La bête humaine

"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.

"La bete humaine" is a film noir avant la lettre. Is this why "film noir" and related terminology such as "femme fatale" is French, in spite of the fact that the indicated films are in general American? Of course not. The term "film noir" comes from an article in a French movie magasine (L'ecran francais, The French screen) about American crime movies after World War II.

The story in "La bete humaine" is a bit shaky. Simone Simon (also known from "Cat people" (1942, Jacques Tourneur)) is the femme fatale, seducing a couple of men. These men need to be totally blinded by love however not to see through her real intentions.

The strong part of the movie is the way it portrays the railroad community of those days. The collegue is not merely a collegue but a friend. The locomotive has a name and is treated as nearly a living creature. Because the train table makes it impossible that everyone returns to his post at the end of a working day, there are special pensions for railroad staff. The film emphasizes the camaraderie between the men in those pensions where the book from Zola more accentuates the diffuclties men alone have to stay away from booze and women.

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 recently saw the remake of this which was rather interesting and found it entertaining. Then, this came and I decided to see it so I could compare both versions. They are different and I liked them both with both having subtle and pertinent differences all good. This one is a French film and one must take that into consideration when watching for this very important reason. It is not uncommon for the French culture to support marriage and at the same time having a lover on the side too. This applies to both spouses and not necessarily endorsed or supported but perhaps tolerated for reasons I don't care to explore. With that in mind, the movie has more meaning in certain scenes. I enjoyed the trains of old and who doesn't like a good movie with trains in them? Objectively speaking, it is shocking what men and women will do when it comes to sex and lust. Nothing is off the table when the desires of the flesh are activated and then unleashed. Many a murder, robbery and perversion is done in this mindset and for those few moments people literally go out of their minds, lose all reason and let their inner beasts out to play and cause harm. Once completed, shame and guilt visit until either one repents (changes in the Greek) or has to have another fix. Being addicted to dysfunction is a curse and can only end one way. Repentance on the other hand leads one to a better way and literally away from the fallen deed or mishap. This principal is acted out and shown quite well in this movie. Good sandwich (French bread) movie and a tasty drink with some chocolate recommended while watching. The nature of the human always makes for good story telling

Jean Renoir's "La Bête Humaine" is an excellent screen adaptation of Émile Zola's novel, which also contains some excellent photography and a fine performance by lead actor Jean Gabin. While usually overshadowed by Renoir's other more (justifiably) celebrated masterpieces, in itself it is a very good picture, with Zola's ideas and characters providing ideal material for the great director.

Most likely, the reason why "La Bête Humaine" is less appreciated than Renoir's other works is because it is so closely tied to the novel - which itself is actually part of a series of novels. Someone not familiar with Zola would find it harder to understand some of the action, especially the behavior of the main character, railway engineer Jacques Lantier (Gabin). There is a brief message at the opening of the film explaining the basic theme, but it would hardly be possible to bring an audience completely up-to-date with just a short note.

The novel on which the film is based is part of a series of 20 novels that Zola wrote, which cover the history of a single family through several generations and through several decades of 19th-century French history. Each of these stories is capable of standing on its own, but they are more satisfying if you know at least something of the broader context. "La Bête Humaine" is one of the last few volumes in the series, and accordingly, it largely assumes a familiarity with the basic themes. Zola had two main concerns in these novels: (i) to show how certain family traits (positive and negative) re-appear in successive generations, and (ii) to show how the lives of a particular family reflect events and trends in French society as a whole. Zola was a naturalistic writer - he had a strong sense of identification with and sympathy for his characters, but he also portrayed his characters and his country in an uncompromising light, just as they were.

There are at least a couple of ways that this context helps better to appreciate the film version of "La Bête Humaine". First, Jacques Lantier comes from a branch of the family that was particularly plagued with mental instability. He has many positive qualities, but also is tormented by barely-suppressed violent urges. Gabin does an excellent job (as he always does) of portraying his character, but some of it is lost if the viewer is unaware of who he is supposed to be. Second, the railway setting, interesting in its own right, is meant to be suggestive of other forces, both within Lantier's mind and also outside of his life. (The action in this story is supposed to have taken place in about 1870, a tumultuous time in French history.)

All of this comes together in the outstanding opening sequence, which shows Lantier's train rushing across the countryside. The beautiful photography and skillful editing help us to feel as if we were in the train with him, and all of this is supposed to suggest not just the setting of the story to come, but also the powerful forces - both inside Lantier and outside of him - which he cannot control.

All of the subsequent plot developments - interesting and sometimes surprising in themselves - build on this foundation. This is nicely and carefully done, even if some of it is unfortunately lost if the viewer does not know a little of the wider context.