"Human Desire" (1954), made during Fritz Lang's last decade as a film director, begins with an emblematic image: a locomotive rushes forward, swift and dynamic, but locked to the tracks, its path fixed, its destination visible. Like Lang's films the train and the tracks speak of a world of narrowly defined choices. The closing image is even more severe: survivor Glenn Ford departs, his locomotive passing a sign on a bridge. Ford does not see the sign, but we do; abbreviated by intervening beams we suddenly see "The world takes" just before the film ends.

This vision of a hostile universe,