Human Desire
I love it when Movies!, channel 5–2 on over the air antennas in NYC, airs a title in its Sunday Night Noir series that I haven’t seen. Human Desire (1954), directed by Austrian auteur Fritz Lang, stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, who’d also teamed in The Big Heat (1953), also helmed by Lang. Ford plays a vet just returned from the Korean War who is drawn into the failed marriage of Grahame and Broderick Crawford. Grahame, of course, was famous for her bad girl roles, which extended into her personal life. It’s obvious where the narrative is headed. Still, it is tense. I enjoyed it, but would not place it in the upper tier of noir. Something seemed missing from Ford’s characterization. Why does such a nice, hard-working guy become obsessed with Grahame, a married woman? Of course, such occurrences are not uncommon in real life, so maybe my complaint has no merit. Still, I might have bought in completely if the character had shown something like the psychological effects of combat, or dropped info about misjudgment from his past. Whatever. I’d rather focus on Lang and one of the supporting players. Lang was wounded four times in WWI. In 1933 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered him the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. He refused and fled the country where he did his best work, the classic silent Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). He first went to Paris, then came to the U.S. in 1934. He made a lot of good movies in America, but none approach the aforementioned. Here’s a quote attributed to him from his bio at IMDb: “Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship.” As for the co-star, I was unfamiliar with Kathleen Case, who played the woman in whom Ford should have been interested. That aspect reminded me of one of the top noirs, Out of the Past (1947), where Robert Mitchum chooses Jane Greer over the nice girl played, I believe, by Virginia Huston. I must have seen Case before, as she did a lot of work in TV. She was seriously injured in a power boat accident in 1959 and was in the hospital for two and a half months. In 1967 her car collided head-on with actor Dirk Rambo’s. 25, he was killed in the fire that ensued, his passenger seriously injured. Felony drunken driving and manslaughter charges against Case were dropped. She was dead by 45. I was unable to find the cause of her death. There’s not much info on her. I wonder if her personal life was similar to Grahame’s. Here she is:
Somehow the floating book shop enjoyed a fourth straight rewarding session, the scaffold once again making it possible. Given the forecast, I was expecting to battle high winds. A few minutes after I’d set up the display it began pouring. I had to break it down and move it away from the curb. Soon a young woman noticed the massive Stephen King novels prominently showcased. She bought both Dreamcatcher and Desperation, and said I’d made her day, although she lamented always finding such great deals while on the way to work instead of on her way home. Of course I wanted more despite the dreary conditions. About an hour later a middle age woman purchased Great Jewish Women by Elinor Slater and Robert Slater and The Work of the Kabbalist by Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, and thanked me effusively. And, as I was packing up, a gentleman walking a dog bought a book in Russian. What have I done to deserve such luck? My thanks to these three king folks.
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