Human Desire

Rough around the edges, hard drinking and hot tempered Carl Buckley has just been fired as Assistant Yard Master at a Midwest American railroad yard in having just one too many run-ins with his dour boss, John Thurston. Carl asks his much younger bride Vicki Buckley to use her personal sway with John Owens, an important railroad client and in whose house she grew up in her mother having been his housekeeper, to help him get his job back, something she seems somewhat reluctant to do but does it anyway to satisfy Carl. While Owens is able to get Carl his job back, Carl begins to believe that Vicki and Owens' relationship is more than just friends. Forcing Vicki to help in writing Owens a letter ensuring that he will be in a certain place at a certain time, Carl, in Vicki's presence, kills Owens. For Vicki, that act is the last straw in their marriage, but she feels she cannot leave him as he lords the letter, which he now has in his possession, over her in her complicity in the murder. Vicki turns to her new friend Jeff Warren, a locomotive engineer based out of the same railroad yard, he who has just returned after three years away fighting in the Korean War. In their burgeoning romance and knowing about Jeff's experience in the war, Vicki ends up inferring that the only way for them to be together as husband and wife, what Jeff wants, is for him to kill Carl.