Lang's remake of Renoir's La Bête Humaine reunites his stars from The Big Heat. Glenn Ford plays an all-American dolt just back from the Korean War, blasély ignoring the advances of his landlord's all-American daughter and heading straight for the open manhole that passes for Gloria Grahame's seductively puckered mouth. Problem is, Grahame has a husband and, as always, a few murders that need to be done. Lang typically replaces Renoir's humanism with a sense of determinism and perverse doom, continually arranging the characters between shots of trains, tracks, and onrushing tunnels. But then, Renoir never had Gloria Grahame. First seen sprawled in bed, dangling one leg in the air, popping mints in her mouth, and playing seedy grind-jazz on the radio, 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.-Jason Sanders, PFA