La Bete Humaine = the Human Beast

“So that the trains and the costumes of another era would not distract his audience, Jean Renoir situated his adaptation of Zola’s novel in 1938. He wanted to make a true tragedy. The hero, Jacques Lantier, is haunted by the curse of alcoholism, and the action from start to finish has a driving intensity that Zola would not have disavowed. Lantier burns with passion for Severine, a strange little creature whose callowness results in a kind of nonchalance bordering on frigidity. She is the accomplice of her jealous husband and passively assists in the murder of her old benefactor and lover. Lantier catches them in the act, and out of love says nothing. He is unable to kill her husband when she asks him to and he ends up strangling her in a fit of passion. Mad with grief, he kills himself, which is not the way Zola ended his novel. Right before his suicide comes one of the most beautiful moments in film, the justly famous Trainmen’s ball”. Reference: Celia Bertin. ‘Jean Renoir: a life in pictures’. London: John Hopkins University Press, 1991. Jean Renoir appears briefly as Cabuche, the poacher. In this film, Renoir perhaps came closest to the dark mood of fatalistic ‘poetic realism’ that characterised the works of Carne and Duvivier in the 1930s. In August 1939, on the eve of WWII, the French Ministry of Information drew up a list of 51 ‘depressing, morbid, immoral and bad for the youths’ films, including ‘La Bete Humaine’. Re-made in the USA by Fritz Lang as ‘Human Desire’ (1954) with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Edgar Buchanan.

Credits: Producer, Robert and Raymond Hakim ; director, writer, Jean Renoir ; photography, Curt Courant, Claude Renoir ; music, Joseph Kosma ; art direction, Eugene Lourie ; editor, Marguerite Renoir ; stills photographer, Sam Levin.
Cast: Credits: Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux, Blanchette Brunoy, Julien Carette.