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Human Desire

Wed Jun 26, 2019 7:00 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Lang’s remake of Renoir’s La bête humaine reunites his stars from The Big Heat. Glenn Ford is just back from the Korean War, ignoring the advances of his landlord’s daughter and heading straight for Gloria Grahame’s seductively puckered mouth. Problem is, Grahame has a husband. Lang replaces Renoir’s 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.