Rent Human Desire (1954)

Decent - Human Desire review by LC

A solid film noir thriller, though the resolution feels very rushed and not particularly satisfying.

Includes big spoilers. - Human Desire review by Steve

 While the rules of film noir had shifted in the fifties from its forties prototypes, Human Desire reverted to the characteristics of the earlier classics. It has a femme fatale in Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame). Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) is the ill-fated male dupe back from the war. Only now it's Korea rather than WWII. Jeff returns to resume his job on the railways.

Vicki is a traditional enough archetype, a provocative, sexually distorted looker motivated by greed. She seduces Jeff to persuade him to murder her violent, abusive husband (Broderick Crawford). For most of the film she seems a victim, as she is physically and mentally tormented by her jealous partner and was sexually assaulted when sixteen by her guardian.  

Eventually we realise that much of the web she spun to entrap Jeff has been lies. Vicky is damaged by exploitative men, but our sympathy is shaken finally when we see the moral vacuum that she has learned to hide. She's quite a horrifying figure, though if ultimately unredeemable, we see that as a woman at that time, her choices are limited.    

No one played hot sleazy trouble like Gloria Grahame and she Ford are incandescent together, as they were a year earlier in The Big Heat. It's Gloria who gives its charge of implied eroticism.  The noir plot is interesting, and the railway setting exploited for suspense, symbolism and expressionist visual art. Not as great as The Big Heat, but still quality film noir.