In 1931, Jean Renoir made La Chienne, also known as The Bitch.  This was remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street in 1945.  Perhaps it was the success of this remake that after Renoir made La Bête Humaine in 1938, Lang decided in 1954 to do a remake of this movie as well, which was Human Desire.

La Bête Humaine is based on a novel of the same name by Émile Zola.  The protagonist is Jacques Lantier, a train engineer.  When sexually aroused by a woman, he wants to kill her.  We are apparently supposed to understand this madness as atavistic, a throwback to caveman days, infused with popular conceptions of Darwinian evolution involving survival of the fittest and nature red in tooth and claw, while at the same time presupposing Lamarckian evolution, in which men have inherited an accumulation of grievances against women.  Lantier reflects on all the women he has wanted to kill over his lifetime, including those he just accidentally brushed up against in the street:

As he did not know them, why was he so furious against them? For, each occasion, it seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offences, the exact recollection of which escaped him. Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancor laid up from male to male since the first deceptions at the bottom of the caverns? And, in his access, he also felt the necessity to fight, in order to conquer and subjugate the female, the perverted necessity to throw her dead on his back, like a prey torn from others forever.

All right, so women are no damn good, and each man’s resentment at being rejected, teased, nagged, and cuckolded, all this has been passed on from one generation to the next through Lantier’s ancestry until today, where he is filled with an urge to give women exactly what they deserve.

Quite frankly, I really don’t get it.  I mean, a basic principle of evolution is that it is not conducive to reproductive success to kill women instead of having sex with them.  We could write this off as the delusions of a lunatic were it not for the fact that one gets the impression that Zola thinks there is some truth to Lantier’s notions.

Anyway, Renoir’s adaption is faithful to the novel, where Lantier (Jean Gabin) has a desire to kill women when sexually aroused. We first see this when he starts strangling his cousin Flore while kissing her, but a passing train breaks the spell, and she survives.

Meanwhile, Monsieur Roubaud and his wife Séverine (Simone Simon) are having marital difficulties. He discovers that her godfather, Grandmorin, used to molest her when she was a child, and she says that this ruined her ability to love anyone. Roubaud forces her to write a letter, asking Grandmorin to meet her on the train. Grandmorin is willing to do so, thinking she wants to have sex, just like old times. Instead, Roubaud enters his compartment with Séverine and stabs him with a knife, killing him.  However, Lantier happens to be a passenger on the train.  He spots Roubaud and Séverine, and he knows what they have done. When Lantier is questioned by the police, while looking into the pleading eyes of Séverine, he says he saw nothing.

Eventually, Lantier and Séverine start having an affair, inexplicably without his having an urge to kill her. She convinces Lantier that her husband will eventually kill her instead, and she talks him into killing Roubaud. However, Lantier just can’t bring himself to do so, probably because Roubaud is not a woman. Disgusted, Séverine breaks up with Lantier.  He asks her for another chance. But before he has an opportunity kill Roubaud, he starts making love to Séverine, then tries to strangle her, while finally stabbing her to death.

Someone else is blamed for the crime, and things don’t look good for him. In the novel, Roubaud and another man are convicted of Séverine’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  At least Roubaud deserved it, even if for the wrong murder.  As for the other fellow, too bad.

In the movie, Lantier commits suicide by jumping off the train.  In the novel, Lantier gets into a fight with Pecqueux, the train’s fireman, because Lantier has been having sex with Pecqueux’s girlfriend, and both men fall from the train to their death.  Either way, Lantier gets the Darwin Award.

Fritz Lang’s remake has the title Human Desire and not The Human Beast, which would be the English translation of the title of Renoir’s movie.  This gives us the first indication that Lang intends to soften the story; for all humans have desires, but to say someone is a beast is to say he is less than human, an animal in the worst sense of the word.

In this remake, Glenn Ford plays Jeff Warren, the equivalent of Jacques Lantier; Roubaud’s equivalent is Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford); Séverine’s equivalent is Vicki (Gloria Graham).

However, unlike Lantier, Jeff has no pathological desire to kill women. Instead, he is completely normal, a veteran of the Korean War, and all-around nice guy. His only moral failing is that he has an adulterous affair with Vicki, and he almost allows her to talk him into killing Carl.  After all, Carl was guilty of murder, as Roubaud was in the original, so he would only be getting what he deserved, and Vicki convinces Jeff that Carl will kill her if she tries to leave him.

However, Jeff realizes that killing Carl would be wrong.  He breaks up with Vicki. Vicki in turn decides to leave Carl anyway. When Carl finds out, he kills her.  We gather that he will end up going to prison.

Earlier in the movie, we were introduced to a nice girl, one who is just right for Jeff, and we know that he will eventually marry her, and they will have a normal, happy life.

There is such a big difference between the protagonists of La Bête Humaine and Human Desire that, despite the superficial similarities of the stories, they are essentially two different movies.  It’s a little like watching a remake of Psycho (1960) in which Norman Bates talks Marion into going back to Phoenix to return the money, after which they get married and live happily ever after.