HUMAN DESIRE (1954)

In the forties and fifties, Fritz Lang had a nice little sideline remaking Jean Renoir movies. In 1945, he remade Renoir’s LA CHIENNE as SCARLET STREET with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, and the result was one of the finest films in the noir canon. In 1954, he remade LA BETE HUMAINE as HUMAN DESIRE with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The results, if not a masterpiece like SCARLET STREET, are still quite impressive.

HUMAN DESIRE centers around the marriage of Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford)—a big lug of a guy with a quick laugh and a hot temper—and his sexy young wife, Vicki (Grahame). Things are okay between Carl and Vicki. He works hard and unhappily at the railroad while she sits around the house looking sexy and waiting for him to come home. Then one day, in a tantrum, he quits his job. By the time he gets to the house, he’s already in a panic and desperate to get his job back. Specifically, he wants Vicki to get it back for him.

Reluctantly, she agrees. She goes to see Carl’s boss, sleeps with him, and gets her husband his job back. But that, it turns out, wasn’t quite what Carl had in mind. In a cold, controlled rage, he forces Vicki to help him murder the guy.

From there, their marriage spirals into a nightmare. Carl drinks all day, beats Vicki at night, and then begs her forgiveness. She only takes this so long before she sets her sights on Jeff (Glenn Ford), one of Carl’s coworkers. Jeff’s a nice guy who’s just back from Korea, but when he meets Vicki you can almost see the steam rise off his face. Before long, Vicki is crying on his shoulder and pulling him toward the bedroom. Once Jeff has seen the promised land, Vicki more or less orders him to kill Carl.

This movie reunited Fritz Lang with Ford and Grahame a year after the three of them had made THE BIG HEAT. Most noir aficionados prefer THE BIG HEAT, and HUMAN DESIRE also suffers from constant comparisons to Renoir’s original LA BETE HUMAINE. The comparisons between the three movies is understandable, but they obscure the fact that, by itself, HUMAN DESIRE is a brutal little triangle of lust and murder. Ford, Broderick, and Grahame are quite good, with Gloria in particular really digging deep. She’s a femme fatale here (a switch from the usual whore-with-the-heart-of-gold role she was confined to for much of her career), but she makes the character a believable combination of sexiness, cowardice and cold-blooded calculation. Vicki’s not a bad person, not exactly. She’s just bad news. If her husband hadn’t lost his job, they might have gone on happily for a long time, but when things do go wrong, she goes wrong with them. In showing how a femme fatale is born from circumstance and bad character, Grahame gives one of her great performances.

The chief criticism to level against the film is that it bails out at the end. Whereas in films like SCARLET STREET and, earlier, in M, Lang was able to see his dark vision though to the end, here he pulls back a little. The ending, though dark and gritty, still has the tease of Hollywood uplift.

Still, there is a lot here to appreciate. Lang could be an uneven director, but there is no doubting his enormous gifts. From the murder in the darkened train car, to Grahame’s post-coital seduction of Ford—turning him from an illicit lover to a would be murderer—Lang’s management of scenes is always brutally effective. This may not be the best film he made, but it is an underrated piece of work.

The Movies Of 1944: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

Check out my new piece on Fritz Lang's THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW over at Criminal Element, the latest addition to my series on the key noir films of 1944. 

Fritz Lang Retrospective

above: Coop kicks Nazi ass.

The New York Times ran a good piece last Sunday on director Fritiz Lang in advance of a new series, FRITZ LANG IN HOLLYWOOD, running at the Film Forum from January 28 to February 10. I'm happy the article singled out the often overlooked Lang spy film CLOAK AND DAGGER, which provides our only chance to see Gary Cooper as a physics professor who dukes it out with Nazis. You read that last part right. Coop's a two-fisted physics professor. The movie is no one's idea of a masterpiece, but it's more fun than your average Lang film (which tended to come in shades of dark and darker).

The series is showing THE BIG HEAT and HUMAN DESIRE, Lang's two films with stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The first one is more famous and highly regarded, but I've always rather preferred the second film's bitter take on, well, human desire. The series also features both of Lang's films with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and SCARLETT STREET. Both are well worth seeing, but for my money SCARLET STREET is the best film Lang ever made and one of the indispensable noirs.

For more on the series, including a complete list of films they're showing, read here.

Read the Times article here.

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956)

What a goofy movie. Beyond A Reasonable Doubt is one of those high concept thrillers that makes for a good ad campaign. It has an easy pitch: a man frames himself for a murder in order to reveal the flaws in the application of death penalty. Then something goes terribly wrong and suddenly he’s unable to clear himself. Will he go to the electric chair or will he find his way out of this mess?

The man in question here is a newspaper reporter turned novelist named Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews). He’s engaged to be married to Susan Spencer (a surprisingly spunky Joan Fontaine) the daughter of the newspaper’s publisher. Tom and Susan are all set to be married when Susan’s father, Austin (Sidney Blackmer) proposes that Tom do an exposé on the flawed criminal justice system. Austin is a fervent opponent of the death penalty, and he wants to show that an innocent man can be convicted of a murder and sentenced to die. He and Tom find a killing in the paper, the murder of a young stripper named Patti Gray, and set about framing Tom for the murder. They document their subterfuge in photographs—Tom posing with a current issue of the newspaper as he plants evidence to incriminate himself—and lock it away in a safe. They don’t even tell Susan what they’re doing—an odd way to treat your fiancé or your daughter, I have to say. It all goes according to plan. Tom becomes the main suspect in the case, he’s put on trial, the trial goes against him, and the politically hungry district attorney (Philip Bourneuf) is itching to send this high profile killer to the chair. Now, all that needs to happen is for Austin to reveal his evidence proving Tom’s innocence…

Which, of course, is where things go wrong for our intrepid reporters. I won’t discuss further developments in the plot, but let’s take a look at its absurdity thus far. I can’t help but note the insanity of the scheme hatched by Austin and Tom. Let me get this straight: they plan to manufacture evidence, lie under oath on the witness stand, and trick the justice system into a wrongful prosecution. Yeah. Good plan, guys. Do they also plan to go to jail for interfering with the investigation of a murder? Don’t they think the cops have better things to do than chase the red herrings of a couple of politically motivated newspapermen?

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt was directed by Fritz Lang at the end of his career in Hollywood (the famously prickly director wasn’t sorry to leave the town, and no one was sorry to see him go). The film has a curiously detached quality you sometimes find in Lang’s American work. Of course, there’s no doubting that he was an influential director, with films like M, Metropolis, and Dr. Mabuse to his credit, and there’s no doubting that his contribution to noir is substantial: Ministry Of Fear, The Woman In The Window, Human Desire are all good films. While I don’t love The Big Heat like a lot people, I do consider the best of his American films, the brilliant Scarlet Street, to be a masterpiece. And yet, having said all that, Lang could be a cold, distant filmmaker. If he had the right material, his chilliness proved an asset. Other times, his just felt unengaged. If the material was silly—as it is here—the resulting film is a none-too-enticing combination of aloofness and absurdity. Lang—who could be a vivid, striking creator of images—here creates a visually flat film with curiously little forward momentum.

Some of this might have been saved by performances, but Lang had a problem in his leading man. Dana Andrews was a fine actor capable of great subtly and intelligence, but in 1956 he was deep in the throes of a brutal battle with alcoholism. Andrews would eventually quit drinking, but in this film he’s paunchy and ineffective as Tom. The character is never easy to understand. Why would he sign up for this goofy experiment in the first place? This is a question that only begs to asked more at the end of the movie when everything is supposed to make sense. In the final moments, the film has a couple of surprises in store, but after you watch the film ask yourself: did those plot twists make things clearer or muddier?

***

A remake of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt starring Michael Douglas has just been released. I probably won’t be seeing it any time soon, but I wouldn’t mind hearing from someone who does.

The Big Heat (1953): A Dissenting Opinion

It’s taken me a long time to figure out why I don’t love Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. It’s a good movie, and its noir bona fides are beyond question. Somehow, though, it has just never struck me as being quite the masterpiece it’s been made out to be by some people.

You can certainly see why the film is so highly regarded. It tells the story of an honest police sergeant named Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) who is investigating the suicide of another cop. The dead cop, it turns out, was mixed up with some highly placed criminals, including Mike Lagana (sleazy Alexander Scourby) and his psychotic henchman Vince Stone (hyper-sleazy Lee Marvin). When Bannion gets too close to their operation, they plant a bomb in his car that accidently kills Bannion’s wife (Jocelyn Brando). Bannion swears revenge and starts smashing his way up the criminal food chain until he finds the men who killed his wife. He’s helped along the way by Vince Stone’s disenchanted girlfriend Debby (Gloria Grahame), but when Vince finds out about Debby’s betrayal he throws a scalding pot of coffee in her face. Vince will live to regret he did that.

Fritz Lang directed the film in high style, and many people consider it his noir masterpiece (though I've always been partial to Scarlet Street). Now, as a human being, Fritz Lang was pretty much a son of a bitch, and as an artist he pretty much presented a son of a bitch’s view of the world. His noir work—indeed, most of his work—is notable for its unforgiving, violent view of human nature. In Lang’s films, people are selfish, mean, and naturally given to violence. If the scenes of Bannion’s idyllic home life seem too good to be true, it might be because Lang thought they were. Of course, the real reason these scenes exist is to create a contrast with Bannion’s job, a job that requires him to leave his home in the middle of the night and go to a nightclub to meet a woman who claims she was the dead cop’s mistress. This contrast, however, only works up to a point because the scenes with Bannion and his wife and daughter are so forced and gooey. The film seems particularly at a loss as to how to deal with the daughter. Once her mother is dead, the little girl seems totally unfazed. To cover this, we’re told that she thinks her mother is “away on a trip.” Really? I mean, the family car exploded outside her bedroom window. Her father is anguished. They have to move out of their home and into a hotel. And she’s still jumping into his arms and asking for bedtime stories? Kids in noirs are generally stupid, but Bannion’s daughter is may well be their idiot queen.

If Lang seems uncomfortable in the domestic scenes, he hits his stride once Bannion sets out to get revenge on the crooks who killed his wife. Lang was a master of mood and action, and this film has all the atmosphere and ass-kicking you could want out of a classic film noir. It has a surprising sexuality, too. The scene where Bannion takes Debby up to his hotel room to talk has an unmistakable sexual pull. She kneels on the bed and more or less offers to sleep with him. He’s having none of it. All he wants is to mess up the crooks who killed his wife. The Big Heat has a brilliantly simple conceit at its center: a cop loses his wife and is left with nothing else but being a cop. The film’s abrupt final scene sets this theme down in stone. The film, as many people have noted, really set the standard for Dirty Harry and all the righteous renegade cop movies that came after it. Notice how Bannion addresses every criminal in the movie by the pejorative “thief”—as in “You’re outta business, thief.” Listen to how Ford spits out that word and you can hear the embryo of Eastwood’s “Well, do ya, punk?”

Ford, an underrated participant in so many noirs (including Human Desire, with Grahame and Lang again), is excellent here. His everyman face belied an intrinsically introspective quality as an actor, and here he seems to be imploding with rage. Likewise, Grahame is perfectly cast as the floozy girlfriend who doesn’t realize that her good luck and easy life have already come to an end. She spends the last third of the movie with her face half-concealed in bandages, and the scenes where she sets out to get her revenge—armed with a mink coat, a gun, and a boiling pot of coffee—are classic.

And yet, the last half of the movie always disappoints me. These scenes lack a payoff for Bannion’s hunt for the killers. I always forget exactly who killed his wife and what happens to the killer in the end (he’s just a punk who’s killed, off screen, by Stone and his thugs). Lagana, the crime lord, is busted off screen. That leaves Stone, the coffee-tossing psycho played by Marvin, to bear the brunt of the retribution. Yet, what leads up to this? The timing of the final confrontation seems arbitrary, and besides, Stone’s comeuppance comes at the hands of Debby. That’s as it should be considering what Debby’s been through, but what happened to Bannion’s obsessive quest to avenge his wife? The movie is over before it seems to finish.

I suspect that some people would argue that The Big Heat’s lack of closure is a strength rather than a weakness. To me, though, it feels more like an oversight. Because of the quality of the filmmaking, the final effect of the film is still quite strong. As I said at the outset, this is a good film, even a very good film. But I don’t think it’s a great one.

*

For a much more positive look at the film, here's a piece from Bright Lights Film Journal.

Finally, here's an excellent piece on Gloria Grahame. I wanted to concentrate on other aspects of The Big Heat, but she was one of the great women of noir. I always think of her as noir's archetypal fallen woman. This piece gets at that quality, I think.