Human Desire
Wed Jun 26, 2019
7:00 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Langs remake of Renoirs La bête humaine reunites his stars from The Big Heat. Glenn Ford is just back from the Korean War, ignoring the advances of his landlords daughter and heading straight for Gloria Grahames seductively puckered mouth. Problem is, Grahame has a husband. Lang replaces Renoirs humanism with a sense of determinism and perverse doom, continually arranging the characters between shots of onrushing trains, tracks, and tunnels. But then, Renoir never had Gloria Grahame. This Langian ubervixen slithers out lines like All women are alike; they just have different faces so that men can tell them apart to become one of the most perfect of noir archetypes.