5/5 This is one beast of a film...
  by Andrew Ellington (Mulholland Drive)
A startling look at the inner demons of mankind, Jean Renoir's tragic film noir `La Bete Humaine' is one of the finest additions to cinema. It is equal parts chilling and seductive, with powerful performances, stylistic direction and heart-racing tension. `La Bete Humaine' is a perfectly concocted film that covers nearly every base with a clear vision that is destined to stain your soul.

The film tells two different stories that intertwine to make one very concise and profound tale. We have Jacques Lantier (a brilliant Jean Gabin), a train engineer who has a very mysterious and apparently violent past. He has no relationship outside of the one with his train, but there is a reason for that. On the other hand we have Severine (a stunning and utterly delicious Simone Simon) and her jealous husband Roubaud. When Roubaud finds out of a previous relationship he finds distasteful he takes matters into his own hands and commits a heinous crime, a crime that Jacques finds himself privy.

The film straddles the line of thriller and film noir with its tasteful handling of the chemistry between Gabin and Simon. There is a restrained theatrical tampering with their love affair (the stills this movie creates with the two of them standing side by side are so in your face yet breathtakingly quiet) that really gets my temperature rising. It's a beautifully handled love story that really unravels at a velocity I find stunning.

The film appears to completely ditch the development of Lantier's violent past when Roubaud commits murder, but this is a clever diversion to something that is growing and growing with each scene. We are taking away from the point of the film through a series of beautifully paced scenes involving Severine and her husband so that when Jacques succumbs to his obsessions we are blown away by the outcome.

But should we be?

I have not read the novel from which this film was adapted, but my appetite has been wetted. There is a marvelously crafted story here of the mind. The mind is a very complicated gift, and this film takes no precautions in portraying that mind as something unexplainable and truly contradictory. I love the fact that one is almost left confused by the ending, as if the story is incomplete, but it is that incompleteness that really elevates the tale and is precisely the point.

Sometimes there are no explanations for our actions.

5/5 La Bete Humaine
  by Michael D. Cannon (Mukwonago, WI USA)
A really slick movie. I didn't know anything about it but took a chance on buying it and am very glad I did. Good pic.

5/5 Renoir's La Bete Humaine
  by John Farr
Jean Renoir's moody adaptation of Emile Zola's book features one of Gabin's seminal pre-war performances, and an arresting turn by the sexy Simon (who'd venture stateside four years later to make "The Cat People"). Renoir's vivid location shooting around trains and train stations portrays the dusty anonymity of one isolated man, while serving as metaphor for a numb, bewildered nation about to enter the dark tunnel of occupation. A stunning, unsettling film from an acknowledged master.

3/5 Weird film, but the ride on the train was great
  by Quilmiense (USA/Spain)

Jean Renoir made his version of Zola's novel. What is fun here is the fabulous sights we see while on the train thru France. Beatiful b&w photography, mind you.

Now, the story I didn't quite get it. I didn't get to care too much about the afflicted engineer; his psyche is really weird to me. Then there's his relationship with the unorthodox femme fatal, for whom I didn't care much either. So the study of characters isn't the best one I've seen in film history.

In brief, boring but beautiful. There are better Renoir films to choose from.


4/5 trains, trains, and more trains
  by Kevin W. Koehler (Los Angeles, CA)
One of the first symbols they teach you about in film critic school (Symbolism Clichés 101) is the big, black locomotive, which represents male sexual libido. Blame Freud and, well, your id. Man is a sexual beast and his dreams - the manifestation of an unconscious mind allowed to conjure any vision fathomable - are mostly the repeated image of his own sex organ.

Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) has a lot of locomotives, so many in fact that it probably slots in between The General and Murder on the Orient Express on the all-time list of most locomotive-saturated frames per minute of running time. Those pictures, perhaps surprisingly, are relatively free of sexual menace (though the Agatha Christie adaptation features the always phallic death by stabbing, if you're so inclined - a little more on this later). The same cannot be said of Humaine, a film that doesn't just feature the darker elements of our carnal natures, but is consumed by them.

Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin from Renoir's own Grand Illusion) is a train engineer. His dirty clothes and ashen face camouflage him with the locomotive on which he rides - man and (sex) machine appear as one. A faulty axel on "Lison" will foreshadow Lantier's own "mechanical" problem where he visits a lady friend and attempts to have his way (where else?) beside some train tracks; overcome by feelings of inadequacy in the face of (what we can only presume) an inability to consummate, he throttles her for his own impotence. A passing train interrupts his manic and violent outburst and Lantier is immediately regretful, blaming some ambiguous and undiagnosed disease of the blood he believes was passed to him from grandfather to father to son. "Is that part of your illness?" she asks him. She means the hands that were about her throat and not the passing train, though she might as well have.

The other doomed man of this story is amiable stationmaster Roubaud (Fernard Ledoux), introduced as he reprimands a rich man for walking his dog on the train platform. It might be petty but Roubaud shows no favorites regardless of class or connections. "Some people need to be taught a lesson," says the woman who brought the complaint. Roubaud agrees, or at least thinks he does. As is usually the case, the person that brings about his eventual downfall is Roubaud himself... but he has an accomplice.

Enter his much-too-pretty-for-a-schlub-like-him wife, Severine (Simone Simon), who spends her days tending to caged birds on their balcony (whose symbolism need not be elaborated upon), shopping, and cuckolding poor, naive Roubaud with the men of the neighborhood. One of these men happens to be an individual of some social standing and a former employer, Grandmorin - Roubaud's discovery of this wealthy man's intimate knowledge of his wife infuriates him to the point of premeditated murder (by stabbing, the modus operandi of every sexually frustrated killer) aboard - you guessed it - a train. Unfortunately for Roubaud, a witness in Lantier is standing a few feet away when the crime takes place and the fate of two men become intertwined.

Though not to the extent of his Upstairs/Downstairs farce La Regle du Jeu, Renoir here is overtly aware of class relationships and class warfare (one memorable scene takes place as the train workers scrape their dinner out of cans, congratulating each other on how much money they saved their bosses on coal that day - the technology that brings us together also divides), even expressing some welcome cynicism at the working class hero vs. robber baron boiler plates that tend to dominate. Roubaud does not want Grandmorin's "cast offs," a strange thing to call one's wife no matter how far she's been passed around. He does, however, have no problem taking the dead man's wallet - only to deflect blame and the attention of law enforcement, of course (and wouldn't it be a waste to just throw out all this money?).

Later, Severine (whose infidelity prompted the original bloodshed) is practically gifted to Lantier by her husband, an exchange for the man's silence. Inevitably, when a budding romance blooms between the two, it does so at night in a lamp-lit train yard. Peering up at a big, black locomotive locomotive, Serverine asks Lantier "May I get on?" "You'll get all dirty," he says.

Indeed.

Interesting footnote: Director Jean Renoir is the son of famed expressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was the subject of many of his father's works in which he is often portrayed, at best, sexual ambiguous, and at worst, as a girl, resulting in much childhood torment at the hands of bullies. See the painting Jean Renoir Sewing for one particularly egregious example.