Human Desire (1954)

'Fritz Lang's 1954 American version of the Zola novel (and Renoir film) La bête humaine. Gloria Grahame, at her brassiest, pleads with Glenn Ford to do away with her slob of a husband, Broderick Crawford. Lang mines the railroad setting for a remarkably rich series of visual correlatives to his oppressively Catholic conception of guilt and retribution. A gripping melodrama, marred only by Ford's inability to register an appropriate sense of doom.'

-- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

( More bestial desire below the cut )