[Film Review] Clash by Night (1952), The Big Heat (1953) and Human Desire (1954)
Three hard-boiled noir-shrouded drama directed by Fritz Lang in his latter Hollywood years, in which, regardless of his temperament (kind-hearted, virtuous or utterly evil), a man’s proclivity for violence (mostly towards the weaker sex) is dyed in the wool. So one might be tempted to dub them as Lang’s “men’s bestiality trilogy”.
CLASH BY NIGHT has the distinction of being birthed out of a Clifford Odets’s play. It is an absorbing melodrama unfurling with startling plausibility about a woman’s seesawing between settling into the traditional role as the angel in the house and following her restless instinct as a maverick branded by cynicism and carnal passion. Stanwyck’s Mae is the said woman, returning to her bayside hometown Monterey, California after her married lover giving up the ghost and her 10-year stretch in the East Coast bearing no fruit. After marrying a well-disposed, down-to-earth fisherman Jerry (Douglas), and giving birth to a daughter, despite herself, Mae’s wandering heart is inexorably magnetized towards Earl (Ryan), Jerry’s friend, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, freshly divorced movie projectionist. Their affair eventually drives Jerry into a murderous rage, partially on account of the insidious abetment from Jerry’s deadbeat uncle (Naish), and Mae is left with a tall order, she must eat humble pie and throw herself completely on a man’s mercy. However, Lang’s film discards Odets’s brutalizing ending and in lieu, settles for a more conventional and sexist ending which betrays perhaps his own biased moral yardstick.
THE BIG HEAT is a stereotyped David and Goliath yarn. An impeccably righteous homicide detective Dave Bannion (Ford) will stop at nothing to expose and dismantle a crime syndicate who is answerable for killing his wife Katie (Brando). He recieves appreciable help from Debby Marsh (Grahame), a materialistic dame who is the girlfriend of Vince (Marvin), a misogynistic thug. The film features a savage scene where a sadistic Vince pours scalding coffee roundly on Debby’s face and disfigures her after gathering that she consorts with Dave behind his back. The sheer, abrupt violence incurred upon a helpless woman is gobsmacking, to say the very least, to watch. Although Debby manages to exact a tit for tat in the climax, her tragic denouement lets on the ugly truth: she is merely functional as a means to an end, which is Dave’s triumph. Apropos of nothing, she turns cold-bloodedly murderous just for Dave’s sake, so that the kompromat is let out in the open. Dave can finally turn the table and complete his revenge.
A similar scenario results in an entire different outcome in HUMAN DESIRE, an adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel “La bête humaine” also starring Ford and Grahame. Here Grahame’s Vicki is blackmailed and abused by her brutish husband Carl (Crawford, whose odiousness really challenges a viewer’s tolerance). Out of desperation, when she insinuates to her new lover Jeff (Ford), a Korean War veteran, that they can be happy together only if Carl is out of the picture, Jeff flips out, feels insulted and manipulated, leaves her to face the beastly Carl on her own. The discrepancy on show between THE BIG HEAT and HUMAN DESIRE can only be ascribed to Lang’s own jaundiced, scornful views on women. Instead of being a hapless, sympathetic victim (which she is, at any rate), Vicki - which is very likely Grahame’s most visceral performance, all that palpable dread, hope, ignited and then dashed, restrained disobedience, are let down by the script’s mean streaks - is mistreated as the “original sin” that drives two men homicidal just because of her questionable past? It is a shady maneuver on Lang and scriptwriter Alfred Hayes’s part. But it also piques Yours Truly’s interest to watch Jean Renoir’s 1938 eponymous adaptation of Zola’s novel.
Scarcely one can find a man isn’t mean and doesn’t hate women in the three films. CLASH BY NIGHT has an addle-brained Jerry voluntarily getting hitched with a woman who clearly doesn’t love him (she tells him very directly so), solely because she is way out of his league. He foolishly reckons that marriage can tame her, which can be imputed to a man’s immanent vanity (who doesn’t want a pretty wife to show off). Audience can sympathize with May’s struggle because her life is stuck in a pickle and Jerry seems to be an easy way out, and the bottom line is she doesn’t cozen him into marriage. On a side note, the film marks Monroe’s first before-title credit (fourth billed), her Peggy, the girlfriend of Joe (Andes), Mae’s tough-as-nail brother, is another simpleton whose free spirit is nipped in the bud. It is a small role and Monroe’s faux-naivety and open-faced posturing is modestly appealing.
Riding on Odets’s vernacular wordings and against Lang’s marked alteration, while Douglas may lay thick on playing the chummy side of Jerry, both Stanwyck and Ryan rise to the occasion with flying colors. May is an incompatible combination of sense and sensibility, she knows who she is and what she wants, yet she often overestimates her sense of proportion. Stanwyck never allows May’s dignity sullied by any derision about her amoral past, and she remains the most compassionate actress in Hollywood’s Golden Era. No hyperbole, sentimentality or glamor, all she trusts is to bring honesty out of her character’s self-worth, even when it is full of flaws. Ryan is also exceptionally gripping as a man who drinks the haterade as if it is lemonade, switching between vulnerable, desperate, vainglorious, maudlin or repulsive at the drop of a hat, and the erotic tension between him and May during the kitchen scenes reaches the white heat mostly due to their neatly choreographed and fervently emoted pas de deux and Lang’s directorial flourishes.
THE BIG HEAT has no frills (CLASH BY NIGHT has that striking fishing and cannery sequences and elemental forces foreshadowing May’s entrapped domesticity whereas HUMAN DESIRE endeavors to document railroad operations à la cinema vérité), it is as straightforward as its plot could go, operating on a Gadarene momentum with film-noir’s familiar trappings. Among the performers, Nolan stands out for her immaculate duplicity and death-defying composure. As the leading man, Ford fares much better here as a pertinacious gangbuster spitting insults to those high-flying hypocrites like nobody’s business, than in HUMAN DESIRE, where his Jeff cannot muster enough urgency as the plot goes thicker and more far-fetched. For example, Carl’s blackmailing is rather untenable, only if Vicky could’ve come clean to the police, the murder case isn’t too hard to explain and Carl would have a more difficult time to explain how come it is him who is in possession of that critical letter! HUMAN DESIRE ends up as a smirch in Lang’s otherwise first-rate track record, reeking of misogyny and self-pity that is too tenacious to dispel.
referential entries: Raoul Walsh’s WHITE HEAT (1949, 8.4/10); Lang’s SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR… (1947, 7.4/10), THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944, 7.5/10).
Title: Clash by Night
Year: 1952
Country: USA
Language: English, Italian
Genre: Drama, Romance, Film-Noir
Director: Fritz Lang
Screenwriter: Alfred Hayes
based on the stage play by Clifford Odets
Music: Roy Webb
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Editor: George Amy
Cast:
Barbara Stanwyck
Paul Douglas
Robert Ryan
Marilyn Monroe
Keith Andes
J. Carrol Naish
Silvio Minciotti
Rating: 7.3/1
Title: The Big Heat
Year: 1953
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Crime, Film-Noir, Thriller
Director: Fritz Lang
Screenwriter: Sydney Boehm
based on the novel by William P. McGivern
Music: Henry Vars
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Editor: Charles Nelson
Cast:
Glenn Ford
Gloria Grahame
Lee Marvin
Jocelyn Brando
Alexander Scourby
Jeanette Nolan
Willis Bouchey
Robert Burton
Adam Williams
Chris Alcaide
Howard Wendell
Peter Whitney
Dorothy Green
Edith Evanston
John Crawford
Michael Granger
Ric Roman
Rating: 7.0/10
Title: Human Desire
Year: 1954
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Film-Noir, Romance, Drama
Director: Fritz Lang
Screenwriter: Alfred Hayes
Based on the novel by Émile Zola
Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Editor: Aaron Stell
Cast:
Glenn Ford
Gloria Grahame
Broderick Crawford
Edgar Buchanan
Kathleen Case
Peggy Maley
Diane DeLaire
Grandon Rhodes
Rating: 5.7/10
