Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24599 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-01-07
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 97 minutes

Synopsis
Made at the height of poetic realism in the French cinema, LA BETE HUMAINE is an adaptation of Emile Zola's classic work, starring Jean Gabin as railroad engineer Jacques Lantier. He lusts after Severine (Simone Simon), the lovely wife of stationmaster Robaud (Fernand Ledoux), but has kept his desire in check. While riding on Lantier's train, Robaud threatens to expose Severine's wealthy and powerful godfather, Grandmorin (Jacques Berlioz), for having violated his goddaughter when she was 16. Grandmorin threatens to ruin Robaud so the stationmaster kills the older man. Although Lantier is a witness, he fails to speak up when the wrong man, Cabuche (Jean Renoir), is indicted because of his feeling for Severine. Eager to ensure the engineer's silence, Robaud insists that Severine become his lover. Lantier does not require extensive persuasion. At length, Grandmorin is exposed and the ingenuous Cabuche is freed. But over time Severine has come to love Lantier. At this point she asks him to kill her husband so they can be together. But Lantier, overwhelmed by revulsion toward all that has come before, refuses to comply with her wishes. Gabin is utterly convincing as the tormented lover in this magnificently atmospheric tale of crime and passion.

Customer Reviews

A great, tough film by Jean Renoir starring Jean Gabin
For the first seven minutes of La Bete Humaine we're in the open cab of a huge steam engine barreling down the tracks at 60 miles an hour from Le Havre to Paris. The only sounds are the roar of the wind and the wheels on the rails. One crew member is hurling shovels-full of coal into the fire box. The other is checking the gauges, pulling a lever, sticking his head out the side to look ahead. The engineer is dressed in dirty coveralls, a greasy cloth cap on his head, protective goggles pushed up on his forehead. The wind rushes over him. We can't hear a thing because of the noise. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of him framed for a moment against the sky. The engineer is Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin). Controlling that huge engine and driving it at speed is what has given his life any meaning. Some film critics say this was one of the movies the early noir directors in the Forties must have seen. Perhaps, but this film transcends the genre.

Lantier is a taciturn working man, not disliked but lonely. He suffers spells of headaches, fever, of "waves of grief," of violent seizures he blames on the alcoholism of his parents. He wears the sadness of life like a cloak on his shoulders. One night, as a passenger on the train returning to Le Havre, he sees the Le Havre station master, Roubard (Fernand Ledoux), and his wife, Severine (Simone Simon), on board. Roubard, jealous of his younger wife, has just killed a man in the man's train compartment. Lantier, looking at Severine, provides a statement that avoids implicating either her or her husband, but then fatefully finds himself falling in love with her. And Severine? "I am incapable of loving anyone," she tells Lantier. But Lantier moves into a passionate affair with her, a relationship which Lantier needs and which Severine uses. Severine realizes how Lantier might be used to solve the problem of her husband's existence. From there, the movie moves ahead with all the power of Lantier's steam engine and with all the inevitability of death. There is no redemption, no absolution for anyone. And at the end, what is Lantier's epitaph? Just "Poor guy."

La Bete Humaine is a great example of Jean Renoir's ability to tell a story which focuses on the humanity of the characters while not flinching from their circumstances or the results of their actions. The style of the movie is integral to its effect. The railway scenes all were shot on location. The grime of the workingmen's lives is everywhere. For all the scenes of the train on the move, only one brief back-screen projection shot was used, at the end of the movie for obvious reasons. Renoir and his cameraman, his nephew Claude Renoir, set cameras on the train focused on the engine cab, or attached to the side of the engine. The train powers its way over the tracks, through tunnels and across bridges. The sound track was recorded right there. Renoir also used great imagery. That shot of Gabin with the goggles on his forehead framed against the sky is almost iconic. A stabbing which takes several minutes is inter-cut with scenes of a dance for the trainmen and a man on stage singing a popular music hall song. The first consummation of the relationship between Lantier and Severine takes place in a hard rainstorm, and the camera cuts away to a downspout gushing water into a barrel, fading out and back to the water slowly stopping in the morning, then moving to a doorway to show two pairs of feet in shoes step away from the small shack. I have to think that Hitchcock would have envied that scene, although Renoir plays it matter-of-factly, without the hint of a smirk.

Gabin, for me, is probably the best film actor. He doesn't show a lot of emotion; his face can sometimes barely move. He's not a particularly handsome man. Even so, he can move from sad longing to fearful emotional distress in seconds. He doesn't seem to look much different when Lantier is happy, looking forward to meeting Severine, to when he looks distressed but determined, when he intends to do what Severine wants him to do. But there is no doubt what Lantier is feeling.

This is a terrific, tough, sad film well worth owning.

Possibly Renoir's finest film
La Bete Humaine is my favorite Renoir and one which tends to divide many of his critics and admirers. For me it's an exhilarating and involving piece of cinema with characters destroyed by and destroying themselves in events in much more credible circumstances than in Regle du Jeu, which gives it some real emotional and thematic weight beyond mere parlor games - not to mention having the thrill of seeing post WW1 French doomed romanticism evolving into proto-film noir before your very eyes. These characters truly do all have their reasons and find their attempts to control events and other people backfiring spectacularly as they lose control in a way that none of the mannequins in Regle do. But it's all subjective. Jean Gabin is superb, the use of locations exemplary and Simone Simon was a babe, even if she does try to bite!

You can taste the smoke
Renoir prefaces this movie with a quote from the Zola novel this is based on, and a picture of the Great Man, as if to insist that this is an authentic version of the novel. But it isn't.

Normally I accept that movies can and should take liberties with novels in order to be better movies. But the comparison here does Renoir no favours, and shows how much we lose in the film. Zola's novel is part of a series portraying a whole society, that of France in the years 1850-70 under Napoleon III. Here he was concerned both with criminality and justice. In the novel there are at least four murders, one suicide (not Lantier's) and a deliberate causing of a train crash which kills 30 people. While Jacques suffers from "The Beast Inside", others murder for revenge, jealousy, money, sex perversion. Zola is saying there are as many types of murder as there are people, and we are all capable of murderous feelings. Justice is seen as venial and corrupt, and not interested in truth even if capable for finding it. This political dimension is lacking.

There are also three spectacular set-pieces connected with the railway in the novel: a train struggling through an awful snowstorm; a gut-wrenching train crash; and the apocalyptic ending where Lantier and Pecqueux fall off the footplate fighting - they fall under the wheels and the bodies are found without heads and feet, but with their hands still round each others' throats. The last image of the novel is the driverless train hurtling ever faster into the night, full of heedless soldiers, drunk and singing, on their way to be cannon fodder at the Battle of Sedan.

I'm sure many of the omissions, and the updating to contemporary (1938) France, were dictated by budgets. But compared with the toughness of Zola, Renoir is gentle and almost leisurely. He couldn't feel towards the Popular Front government of his day the contempt Zola felt towards Imperial France. So instead he gives us is an intense trio of characters doomed to the miseries of love; wanting it and incapable of giving or receiving it. Gabin as the hero stricken with the homicidal urge conveys a world of sadness and isolation almost without moving a muscle; but look at him looking at himself in the mirror after murdering his lover Severine, and you see a great movie actor at work. Simone Simon does an immensely subtle job with the difficult part of Severine, amoral, driven from one crisis to the next, and tragically aware of her own frigidity as a result of child abuse; her longing for love and her eventual thawing are most moving. The actress went on to do good work in Hollywood in the Cat People movies, and also with Max Ophuls in the 1950s, but nothing like the intensity of pain and longing we get here.

The third side of the triangle, Severine's husband Roubaud, is played with great deadpan dignity by Fernand LeDoux, a classical French actor with no hint of slumming it. He has the most difficult part, in that his character appears in fits and starts, but in his discovery of the body of his wife, all his emotion is seen in his back, a great piece of physical acting. (Trivia note: Both he and Simone Simon lived to be 95)

Others have drawn attention to the brilliant filming of the murder intercut with a cheap bal musette song, the lovely indirect filming of the lovers' first night of passion, and the influence of the flawed, doomed Severine on a generation of film noir heroines. Plus the railway itself is tangible, it is so lovingly shot. Not until "The Train" in the 1960s The Train [1964]does a locomotive star so magnificently again in a film.

But because it is trying to fit 500 pages into 90 minutes, there are many loose ends (What happens to Cabuche? Or Flore?). It isn't the best Renoir, and it might have been a better film if it had been more faithful to the spirit if not the letter of the book.