When The Screw Turns-With Fritz Lang’s Human Desire In Mind

 

By Zack James 

 

I have been up against some screwy feelings in my time, thoughts of revenge for some slight, great or small, thoughts about ending it all, weary of life, wanted to strangle some dame for two-timing me, or worse three-timing meaning she was two-timing two guys me included but I never did anything about it. Although maybe on the last one I should have. I always calmed down a little and figured a way out of the dilemma, figured that tomorrow was another day and I could regroup a little, get a new start.

Not everybody is like that, not by a long shot, not everybody can rein in their emotions and do the right thing, or at least not the wrong thing. Take this film I watched the other night, Human Desire, a film I am watching as part of a series of films by the great director Fritz Lang, the guy who started everybody getting serious about film, about using film as more than entertainment, as social commentary, as commentary on the human condition, as what we would call today social networking,   with that Metropolis of his. The people in that former film, a film based on a book by Emil Zola, the guy who stuck his neck out to defend Alfred Dreyfus back when it counted, are all over the place. Let things mostly get out of hand. Let human desire get a sad ass workout in a bad way, the baddest way possible, murder, murder, one when you think about it.

The funny part is that the film, maybe like life starts out just fine. A guy name Jeff, played by Glenn Ford, just back from the Korean War is getting back in harness as a railroad engineer and ready to settle down too (who knows for how long on that sweet engineer’s job given the decline in railroad traffic and usage in the “golden age of the automobile” in the 1950s). Maybe with some lady, maybe play the field for a while and then settle down who knows. Then all hell broke loose. See this roughneck, drunken railroad sot named Carl (played by Broderick Crawford a perfect roughneck and drunken sot last seen in this space playing Willie Stark to Oscar-dom in the film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men) has this dishy tramp of a wife, Vicki, played in B-film grandeur by Gloria Grahame, a girl who goes with the highest bidder, a girl looking out for herself and her own desires, whom he suspects is running around on him. He was an older guy and she was, well, a dish and so his fears were well-founded especially when he asked her to ask to pretty please a railroad executive she used to work for to get his job back after a tiff with his yard boss who fired him. Up to her old tricks she jumped right back into bed with that railroad exec which makes you wonder, and you would not have to stretch your imagination to far what kind of work she did for him back before she married meal ticket  Carl.  

One thing everybody knew was that Carl saw red every time a guy even looked at Vicki so you know that nothing good was going to happen when Vicki came back late and all in a tumble, lipstick smeared, after “pretty pleasing” that railroad executive. Carl beat her up just for smiling the wrong way (poor Gloria, playing plenty of tramp parts, and playing them well, got beat up plenty of times, or worse one time in a film got hot coffee thrown in her face by a wise-guy played by Lee Marvin). Then for kicks he Carl killed that railroad executive while all three were travelling to Chi town. Yeah, Carl killed him dead, made Vicki watch the damn thing and sign a letter, a letter that would force her to stay with him. So you saw the downside of the human condition right before your eyes.          

Enter Jeff who had been free-loading a ride on the train while all this murder and mayhem was going on. Enter Vicki being used to distract Jeff while Carl made his getaway. When the body was found and there is an inquest Jeff clamed up to protect Vicki. That started an affair between the two. An affair and a deranged notion by Vicki that all her cares would be over if she had that letter, had Carl six feet down in the ground too. So she recruits Jeff to do the deeded. Another ignoble example in the question of human desire.  But Jeff was tired of killing, tired of being some fall guy for some off-the-wall dame’s revenge fantasies. He balked. Problem: Carl suspects that Jeff and Vicki were having an affair even though Jeff had called the whole thing off when he passed on the murder one rap he would have been facing just to make Vicki shudder with delight. He did grab the letter from Carl and gave it to her as a parting present. Carl was not as forgiving as he strangled the hapless tramp wife Vicki on the train once he knew she had the letter and he had nothing to hold over her. Jeff went on his merry way captaining the train while dastardly murder was happening in the rear. Strange nutty thing human desire when it gets twisted into a guy’s head-or a gal’s.