dlee2012 This is an uncharacteristically dark film for 1930s French cinema. As its name implies, it explores the darker aspects of the soul and the nature of total depravity.The screenplay deviates in some significant ways from the novel by Zola on which it is based but the major themes remain strongly intact. The film shows that whilst man may have created an industrialised, modern world far removed from nature, the vicious animal remains not far below the surface of his veneer of civility.Renoir's skills had developed since he worked on Une Partie de Champagne just a few short years earlier. He has much stronger actors this time and the cinematography, already his strongest suit, is quite extraordinary throughout here (the scenes filmed from the locomotives are genuinely exhilarating.) Unfortunately, the story loses tempo in the second half where less action takes place on the rail network. Also, the editing is very poor in places, marring the story to a certain extent.The parallel scenes of the emotionally-moving performance of a song juxtaposed with Lantier looking over Severine's body is particularly effective.Characterisation still isn't a strong point of cinema in general, even this late in the 1930s but the actors do a credible job with the material. Only occasionally are they stilted. Of course, in this film, the locomotive Losin is itself a character and acts as Lantier's refuge and even an extension of his troubled nature and explosive outbursts.It is tempting to read the dark ending of murder, madness and suicide as reflective of the mood of foreboding in France this close to the War. Notably, Zola's original ending in which the train, carrying soldiers to fight in the Franco-Prussian War are sent to their destruction was changed. Whether or not this was due to censorship, this reviewer does not know.Ultimately, this is a strong film about the depraved nature of humanity but it is still a very flawed one. The rhythm and pacing fall away in the second half and Renoir's editing is still crude. The lighter touch of the French cinema of the first half of the 1930s is now sadly absent and a little more psychological insight is needed. Nevertheless, as mankind hurtled towards another unnecessary war, this film was an important reminder into how evil and fallen we all are, a message that bears constant repeating, especially in this day and age.

david-sarkies La Bete Humaine is the adaption of a novel written in 1890 and deals with the bestial nature of humanity. The movie itself dragged on and was difficult to follow. The only sensical parts were dealing with three characters, Severin, her husband, and a man that has inherited a disease after many generations of alcoholics. I think the husband's name is Goutrand and the man's name is Latrine.The movie is centred around railroad employees in France. Goutrand works as a station master and Latrine is an engineer. The movie opens describing Latrine's condition: his disease is due to many generations of alcohol abuse. We see soon in the movie that he looses control and enters a murderous fit. He seems to be the human beast of the title. But this is not the only problem because we learn that a millionaire name Grandmorin abused Severin when she was younger. She reveals this to her husband and he becomes very aggressive. Severin is very manipulative for she seems to use Goutrand, her husband, to kill Grandmorin and then tries to manipulate Latrine into killing Goutrand. Thus we see that the beast is not located simply in Latrine but in many other people as well.I had trouble following this movie and thus am not able to delve deeply into it. What I do see in it though is the exploration of the bestial nature of humanity. There does not seem to be a division between those who are good and those who are bad, but we are all bad inside. Severin comments on how Goutrand used to be a really nice man but he no longer is. She believes that he has changed though it is doubtful that he really has. Goutrand is the same person as he always was, it is just that she has come to know him much better and now sees the corruption that stains him.

wvisser-leusden In all his splendid career, Jean Gabin can seldom have acted better than in 'La bete humaine' (= French for 'the human beast'). I do not exaggerate when I label his performance as breathtaking.Apart from this, 'La bete humaine' is an excellently made film. Competent acting, to start with -- for instance by female lead Simone Simon, a forgotten name. This film's setting in a French railroad-environment adds the right amount of drama, and provides a solid foundation for its plot. According to the technical standards of 1938, its shooting is first-class.'La bete humaine' is a novel from the Rougon-Maquart-series by the great French author Emile Zola. Back in the second half of the 19th century, Zola wrote 'naturalism': an ultra-realistic style with a bottom-line of pessimism. Coincidence or not, this style fits well with the year 1938, when Adolf Hitler's dark shade was already looming over Europe.

jzappa 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.