Human Desire (1954) review

Jeff (Glenn Ford), a railroad engineer back in the States after fighting in the Korean War, gets in the middle of a love triangle involving co-worker Carl (Broderick Crawford), his manipulative wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) and their boss John Owens (Grandon Rhodes), with whom Carl suspects Vicki has been having an affair.  Renoir did his adaptation of Émile Zola's novel years prior, and it's much better than this: no one knows how to siphon the air out of a room like Lang, and all three characters are pretty loathsome and don't deserve an ounce of pity.  Ford's character is the least awful of the bunch, but he's pretty much a slightly animated mannequin.