“She was born to be bad”?  (The Gloria Grahame character, that is.)

Well, maybe.  But both spouses in the Fritz Lang film, Human Desire (1954), are very morally flawed, which makes for a more interesting thriller than it would otherwise be.  It’s raw from start to finish, with sentimentality miles away.  Lang seems to respect that it’s based on a Zola novel, creating some of the force and grimness of European cinema old and more recent.  And the sapid cast is not shy about the realization.

Human Desire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)