Stuff on TV

Last week I watched an old Fritz Lang movie Human Desire loosely based on Zola’s La Bete Humaine. The atmosphere was certainly Zolaesque, miserable, ground down people trapped in their miserable, animalistic lives with the industrial background an ever present metaphor. The industry in question being a railroad the metaphor was almost comically Freudian but the film positively dour, a reminder that America didn’t all miraculously turn Technicolor after the war. There was one white picket fence on show but blink and you’d miss it, looming larger on the landscape were the dead end bar where prematurely aged railway men numbed their inadequacies and the cramped hallways of domestic discontent. The cheap artificiality of the women’s lacquered hair and girdled waists managed to dim even Gloria Grahame’s sultry looks, she played the femme fatale part but came across more as a battered wife, drowning as much as luring.

In other news Heroes and the first of the Christopher Ecclestone episodes. ( Read more... )