Fritz Lang Remakes Jean Renoir for Hollywood: Film Noir in Three National Voices

Abstract

Fritz Lang’s 1954 noir romance Human Desire (1954), both an adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine (1890) and a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 screen version of the same title, provides an invaluable site for the examination of the complex intersections among the three principal traditions, literary and cinematic, that are constitutive of the American film noir. These are: the fiction of James M. Cain, with its emphasis on destructive romantic entanglements; the filmic tradition of poetic realism, recognised in the early post-war period as a stylistic and thematic practice that anticipated the American film noir; and, German Expressionism, as represented by one of its most famed practitioners, Fritz Lang, whose concerns with the workings of the modern justice system notably inflect his versioning of Zola’s sordid tale. Like many transnational film remakes, Human Desire displays a complex series of recontextualising gestures, the larger interest of which is that they illustrate the ways in which the traditions constitutive of noir can be invoked in the process of re-assembling for another cinematic tradition a text that was wildly successful in a related, but finally distinct, form of filmmaking.