Forget the literary source of Lang's "Human Desire:" what's on the screen is the movie made, the movie seen, and the movie grasped. And what's in front of the viewer here is a failure of character/plot. I don't know how anyone can walk away from this film without a strong impetus to strangle the director for having failed an otherwise effective production.
While siding with Vicki Buckley's (Grahame) lifelong, victimizing, ordeal throughout the film, which directly entails her battering husband (Crawford) and her somewhat covetous rescuer, Jeff Warren (Ford), Fritz Lang, in his story's final minutes, treacherously switches his alliance to his two leading men. His lust test flipped off, his men are now free, one to murder his battered wife, the other to marry his homespun prom gal about 20 years his younger.
The plot should have been rolled back to the moment that Jeff Warren passed the murderer (with his wife) in the night. He notices something askew and there's this briefest glance of suspicion and sympathy. But that moment is erased from Warren's consciousness and from the plot, which stays on track. What if Warren, instead, started investigating on his own, moved by a growing sympathy for the wife and her plight, and that he began to see her for herself and not as primarily sexually compelling--or more accurately, an embodiment of his own desire. He could have put Carl and his ilk on the hot seat, snapped his own fraudulent bond with him, drew in the law, freed Vicki for the first time in her life from the grasping paws of men, and returned to his own life on the railroad with a cleaner and clearer outlook rather than with that final simpering grin.
Would this plot have broken some production code, some film noir stipulation for a femme fatal over a femme veritas? Absolutely not, and the film would have been true to its initial impulses, and initial characterizations. Instead, we got the botched job, which satisfied no one except (perhaps) a few misogynists, and infuriated many.
While siding with Vicki Buckley's (Grahame) lifelong, victimizing, ordeal throughout the film, which directly entails her battering husband (Crawford) and her somewhat covetous rescuer, Jeff Warren (Ford), Fritz Lang, in his story's final minutes, treacherously switches his alliance to his two leading men. His lust test flipped off, his men are now free, one to murder his battered wife, the other to marry his homespun prom gal about 20 years his younger.
The plot should have been rolled back to the moment that Jeff Warren passed the murderer (with his wife) in the night. He notices something askew and there's this briefest glance of suspicion and sympathy. But that moment is erased from Warren's consciousness and from the plot, which stays on track. What if Warren, instead, started investigating on his own, moved by a growing sympathy for the wife and her plight, and that he began to see her for herself and not as primarily sexually compelling--or more accurately, an embodiment of his own desire. He could have put Carl and his ilk on the hot seat, snapped his own fraudulent bond with him, drew in the law, freed Vicki for the first time in her life from the grasping paws of men, and returned to his own life on the railroad with a cleaner and clearer outlook rather than with that final simpering grin.
Would this plot have broken some production code, some film noir stipulation for a femme fatal over a femme veritas? Absolutely not, and the film would have been true to its initial impulses, and initial characterizations. Instead, we got the botched job, which satisfied no one except (perhaps) a few misogynists, and infuriated many.