Both Jean Renoir’s 1938 film The Human Beast with Jean Gabin and Fritz Lang’s 1954 film Human Desire are adaptations from French novelist Émile Zola’s 1890 psychological thriller La Bête humaine. When he's fired from his job at the railroad, Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) asks his wife, Vicki (Gloria Grahame), to pay a visit to his boss, Owens (Grandon Rhodes), to try to earn his sympathies. It works, but Carl then assumes that Vicki and Owens are involved romantically, so he murders his boss in a jealous rage. Sick of her husband's violent ways, Vicki seduces Jeff (Glenn Ford, in Gabin’s role), another worker at the railroad, hoping that she can convince him to murder her husband.