The Human Beast

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Jean Renoir's "La Bete Humaine" (1938) stars Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in an adaptation of Emile Zola's novel. Renoir's novel is part of a series following a family. Lantier (Gabin) suffers from an inherited illness, possibly a chemical dysfunction. He's given to violent outbursts. He falls for the beautiful and childlike Sevarin (Simon) who, with her husband, kills her lover. Lantier witnesses this. Sevarin wants him to help kill her husband.

This is a beautifully photographed, bleak story with the symbolism of the railroad (Lanier is a railway engineer) running through it. Gabin is terrific as the tragic Lanier, and Simone Simon is effective as the woman.

Fritz Lang's later film "Human Desire" is also based on the Zola novel, but the Renoir version has more layers, particularly in the characterizations.

Highly recommended.