A Besta Humana

Jean Renoir's work has been the best of all possible cinemas in the French thirties:a ruthless bourgeois wholesale massacre (la chienne,1931,Boudu sauvé des eaux,1932),Italian neorealism ten years before Rossellini,DeSica et al(Toni,1934),cinema verité before Godard (la vie est à nous ,1936)romantic and tragic pastoral,(une partie de campagne,probably his masterpiece,1936),pacifism(la grande illusion,1937,his most overrated,thus the most popular),history (la revolution française,1938)then "la bête humaine".

"La bête humaine" is arguably the best Zola screen adaptation.Seventeenth part of the Rougon-Macquart family saga-one of the peaks of French lit in the 19th century-,this could be the best with the exceptions of "l'assommoir" and "Germinal".The hero is a son of Gervaise Macquart ,Jacques Lantier.He was not mentioned in any of the previous books,because Gervaise had only 3 children (Nana,Etienne(in Germinal) and Claude (in l'oeuvre),and Zola needed one more,so he made up this fourth child from start to finish.What he needed was a hero with a history of mental illness (stemming from alcohol).Jean Gabin portrays Jacques with a sublime conviction:the scene in which he tries to strangle Blanchette Brunoy to whom he confesses he can't help it,he can't escape the terrible fate which is in store for him.

When he meets Severine(Simone Simon,the future heroine of Tourneur's "cat people'(1942)),and is attracted by her sexually,the woman,whose husband (Fernand Ledoux) is anything but handsome, feels in deep in her perverse soul, that she's found the right killer,because she has discovered he's unable to keep his self-control .

Some scenes are absolutely unforgettable:the beginning,which films the railroad tracks as never before;the railroad men dance,during which a murder is committed while a singer is crooning an old song,"le petit coeur de Ninon";the final,faithful to Zola to a fault: a train,belting in the night,gone mad,which becomes a metaphor not only for Lantier's descent into hell,but for the country (it's 1938!) heading for the darkness.Renoir had transposed the action in th thirties.These dazzling pictures perfectly echo Zola's extraordinary lines:"Elle roulait,roulait sans fin,comme affolée de plus en plus par le bruit de son haleine"(It was rolling,endlessly rolling,as if it were more and more panic-stricken by the sound of its breath).

Remake by Fritz Lang in 1954 :"human desire" with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame;although I admire Fritz Lang very much,I think his effort is neatly inferior.

The two most noted elements of Jean Renoir's classic "poetic realist" precursor to film noir are indeed the two elements I felt worked more as ends in themselves than seminal features of the story. They are the use of the train as "one of the film's main characters," as Renoir himself describes, and the characterization of Simone Simon's "femme fatale." There is genuinely palpable sensory vibrance in the extensive book-ending sequences of Jacques, played by Jean Gabin, and his best friend utterly obsessed by manning a steaming, chugging locomotive as it speeds down railroads, in and out of pitch black tunnels, and blackens their faces with the smoke it incessantly pumps into the sky. The flames of the furnace, the peripheral landscape speeding by. We have the feeling not of watching reality but of being occupied by it, a feeling prolonged as we experience, as if for the first time, the impact of abruptly emerging from a tunnel, ultimately screeching to a halt in the linear spectacle of a vast rail yard.

I suppose the speeding train is supposed to spark the fierce percussion that outlines the film. Other than these two extended set pieces, La Bete Humaine is a succession of mercurial sketches. It all flows from labor and of the limited time stolen from labor. It's a film of hurried transitions, where all appear to be perpetually passing through doors or climbing stairs or peering out windows. Volumes are spoken when the seductive wife of one of Jacques' colleagues is greeted into her lustful godfather's study while the door is warily closed behind her. A reckless Jacques flees the dance hall unobserved by the dancers, engrossed in their ecstasy. I was intrigued that we see the moments before and after all the murders and seductions but not they themselves. So many crisp exchanges of glances. The blackening impact of a wife's chance admission is found in the way she and her aggressively jealous husband can't bear to look each other in the eye.

Uncharacteristically of me, I found the remake much more affecting. Fritz Lang's Human Desire is, to me, the stronger film in terms of character. La Bete Humaine gets its themes across in its own restless way, but the result is lightweight in effect, while Lang's 1954 version is unyielding in depicting the spiritual isolation of the characters. He punctuates the dramatic action with threatening shots of the many railroad tracks interlacing and breaking away. He needs not brandish any certainty of intention for them to act as metaphor for the characters' paths tying themselves in knots. Lang remained in the shadows as a more effective way of showcasing a distinctive style. Strait-jacketing its insight and intensity, Human Desire is the more resonating parable for the shadows of human rationale and the distortion of the heart, and of desperate characters who lead disappointed lives.

Renoir cast Simone Simon as the adulterous wife at the center of Emile Zola's falling house of cards. He posits that the cute, innocent, kittenish women are the ones to watch out for because you are so enamored with their sweet and endearing nature that you would never suspect them of manipulating you. Well, that is very true. All of us, men and women alike, have encountered a female of this deceptive kind. She is a femme fatale in her own right. But Simon remains in the role of an exotic object, rather than meeting the male characters on their own level, the way Gloria Grahame does in Human Desire. Grahame was always seductive enough to make you crazy, but so audacious. There wasn't a demure bone in her ferociously sexy body, but that made her even more effectively cunning and guileful. She came at her male puppets headlong, and matched their presence as well as their wits.

Grahame and Glenn Ford remain sympathetic in their own respective ways, though one is in some sense a champion and the other is an adversary, just like Gabin and Simon here, but Grahame and Ford evoke a more lucid understanding of their desires, and in the face of the cruelty and ruthlessness in getting what they want, regardless of how far they unravel each other's darkest colors, despite the scorpion-like sidestepping around their flirtatious relationship. Accordingly, Human Desire is a boldly familiarizing study of the sense of right and wrong, achieving its shadowy effect by aiming for your heart and loins rather than only your cerebrum. The development of the drama in La Bete Humaine could be totaled in roughly ten or fifteen close-ups. Renoir just bulks up the lonesome hardships of his three central characters in a wholly animated world of locations and things. If one doesn't totally take in the materiality of the rail yards, rooming quarters and dance halls, the incessant coming and going on platforms and in corridors, the buzz and capricious commotion grinding amidst any personal dilemmas, we can barely be so involved in the uninvited and unconscionable devastation brought down on the three jinxed protagonists.

At any rate, in its own right, La Bete Humaine is a fine piece of stylized realism about disillusionment, done with an embellished aestheticism that, while it draws more attention to its representational elements, is still what gave Renoir's great films Grand Illusion and The River such beauty, humor and vitality. It is best to see this film unfettered by Fritz Lang's later adaptation, to take into account all of the fixations of its own time and culture without any outside influences, to see it as its own (human) beast.

I was very surprised when I watched this film; right in the beginning I spotted a great deal of similarities with Fritz Lang´s 1954 flick "Human Desire", with Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford, which I had previously seen. Both films are based on Zola´s story, and, obviously, the merit is Renoir´s, since his version is much better. The psychological and deep meaning beneath the coolness of the main character (Jacques Lantier, in a Gabin memorable performance) is handled superbly; so is his troubled relation with Simone´s character. Despite some boring shots, the photography and screenplay are gems, and "Bete Humaine" ends up being a great addition to Renoir´s filmography. I love him; "La Grande Ilusion" and "La Regle du Jeu" are two of my favorite films; a masterful storyteller and a curious observer of the human soul. A humanist.

"La Bete Humaine" is many things------an excellent film version of an Emile Zola novel; an outstanding (if little known) work by the famous French film director, Jean Renoir; a movie that captures memorable performances by its very capable cast; probably the greatest movie to use real trains as an essential plot device ever made; and a superbly photographed drama that holds your interest from beginning to end.

But perhaps the most critical claim this movie can make is to define the basic text of the film noir femme fatale role that was to become such an important aspect of Hollywood's most innovative creations of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Simone Simon's Severine Roubaud can and should be seen as the precursor of such similar characters as Jane Greer's Kathie Moffett in the film noir classic "Out of the Past (1947)" almost ten years later. Both are highly complex characters with dangerous sexuality and a totally amoral view of life. Both make it very difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction in what they say to us. Simone Simon plays the Jean Gabin character like a well-tuned musical instrument-----and Jane Greer's Kathie is no less successful in manipulating Robert Mitchum's character. Both are beautiful, childlike at times, feminine at other times, very different than what they seem to be, seductive to an extreme and in the end---destined to experience the consequences of a life not well lived.

"La Bete Humaine" can be enjoyed on its own terms as a seminal example of great French film drama of the 1930s. However, its more important message is to give us an early illustration of the origins of Hollywood film noir's femme fatale.

Next time you wonder where all those deadly dangerous female predators came from in American film noir, check out "La Bete Humaine." For fans of the genre, it should definitely be on your must-see list.

The point that you really could do with reading at least some of Zola's mammoth saga is well taken - I've only read Germinal so I'm afraid that lets me out. The many puzzling bits in the plot would probably not be: why such fleeting references to ancestral drunkeness and epilepsy, what happened to Cabuche, were Jacques and Bess in a serious sexual relationship?

Basically outraged and cuckolded middle-aged husband murders beautiful young wife's childhood ancient sugar daddy, she (Simon) drifts into stocky Gabin's and/or a lithe young man's arms, sex and violence result as surely as the earthy pre-War French trains ran on time. Some marvellously atmospheric nitrate b&w photography even when under the arc-lights, some scintillating and also some surprisingly clumsy framings from Renoir, some tremendous acting from the leads and trains, some brief but jarring full orchestral incidental music, and what are we left with all these decades later? A clever, well-made, entertaining and then-popular now relatively ignored (IMDB eg Bete Humaine 17 Amelie 1033) film applauded to the rafters as Art because it's Renoir. There could be no other outcome for this film - it was Fated to be Art after all!

It's very good and been one of my favourites for decades now, not as essential mind furniture but more as an enjoyably engrossing proto-noir romp with subtitles.