Nearing the end of my French viewing marathon,I realised that I have never seen a film from one of the most legendary French directors: Jean Renoir. Looking at Renoir DVDs on Amazon,I found out that Fritz Lang's Film Noir Human Desire (which I own,but have yet to see) was a remake of a Renoir (who has "Noir" in his name!) movie,which led to me getting set for my first Renoir viewing.The plot:Running a train between Paris and Le Havre, Jacques Lantier tries to stay on his own,due to going into a murderous rage for any women he falls in love with (what a romantic!) Despite his best efforts,Lantier is unable to take his eyes off the deputy station masters wife: Séverine Roubaud. Learning that she has had an affair with a rich guy called Grandmorin, Séverine's husband gets her to arrange a meeting on a train.Pulling Séverine along,Roubaud covers the windows and kills Grandmorin. Witnessing the murder,Lantier discovers that he is unable to overcome his human desire for Séverine.View on the film:Starring in the first of his two Film Noirs to get remade in the US, (the other being the soon to be banned Le Jour se Leve,remade as The Long Night) Jean Gabin gives a towering,simmering with anger Film Noir loner performance as Jacques Lantier. Covered with coal from the train,Gabin coils Lantier tightly up and keeps an intense evil under the surface aura bubbling away,which Gabin gradually cracks to cover the coal in blood.Looking like one of the cat people whose got the cream,the sexy Simone Simon give a seductive performance as Femme Fatale Séverine Roubaud. Catching the stray light in her black coat,Simon brilliantly digs her nails into the psychological trauma of Roubaud,whose delicious,double crossing Femme Fatale sting Simon gracefully carries with an air of impending doom. Caught between Lantier and Séverine, (plus a Jacques Becker cameo) Fernand Ledoux gives a hard-nosed performance as Mr. Roubaud,whose restless use of force to get his way,Ledoux wonderfully turns into Roubaud seeing the Film Noir darkness in a watch.Putting Émile Zola's 1890 novel on Film Noir tracks,the screenplay by co-star/co-writer (along with Denise Leblond) /director Jean Renoir places Séverine so tantalisingly close to Lantier that his Noir desires reveal themselves in the rawest form possible. Hitting the acts of violence with a blunt force,the writers superbly opens up the brittle veins of the Roubaud's and Lantier,where every suspicion Lantier gains on the mystery of the murder,brings the viper charms of Lantier and Séverine burning across the screen.Rubbing the charcoal pessimism on Lantier's face,director Renoir & cinematographer Curt Courant give their doom-laded train ride an extraordinary, reflective Film Noir atmosphere,by turning the camera to look at the mirrors of poisonous human desire seeping out of the seams. Entwining Lantier and Séverine in an ultra-stylised Noir embrace,Renoir drives the title with a magnificent Film Noir atmosphere, threading the fractured romance between the Roubaud's and Lantier with merciless lines of shadows uncovering Lantier's human desire.

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." - Lenin Jean Renoir directs "The Human Beast". The film opens with a bravura sequence, beautifully edited, Renoir watching as coal smeared rail-road engineers wordlessly run a locomotive across the French countryside, over bridges, through towns and eventually into the begrimed embrace of a vast rail yard. For a film made in 1937, this sequence feels startlingly modern; an exhilarating cacophony of hand-signals, clattery machinery, angry smoke, competing sounds and of course the train itself, which thunders on like an ink-black monster.After this virtuoso opening, "The Human Beast" settles into now familiar territory. Jean Gabin plays Jacques Lantier, an engine driver who witnesses a murder on one of his trains. The corpse was the wealthy godfather of Severin, the wife of a stationmaster. As he is in love with Severin, Lantier keeps quiet when interrogated by the police. Big mistake. The film then develops into a noirish psycho-drama rife with double crosses, ex-cons, murder, jealousy, femme fatales, sexual manipulations and love triangles. No surprise then that "Beast's" plot often gets it listed as being one of, if not the, first "film noirs", though of course this term wasn't around in 1937. Renoir's film predates the canonised noirs of the classic era by at least a decade.And as with most noirs, a sense of fatalism suffuses "Beast". Lantier suffers periodic fits of homicidal madness, drunkenness and debauchery, all of which he attributes to his similarly debased ancestors. Their blood pumps through his veins, he believes, their bestial behaviour written in his genetic code. Lantier is so convinced that his afflictions are fated, and therefore incurable, that he seems to have confined his life almost exclusively to the driver's cabin of his train. Affixed to its tracks and always thundering along, the locomotive epitomises Lantier's sense of noirish predestination. His only escape? Suicide. The film ends with Lantier violently throwing himself from his train. Only in death can he escape what he perceives to be his life's fixed tracks.But Renoir makes it clear that Lantier is indulging in rationalisations. The train actually soothes Lantier's "hereditary" seizures, and it is repeatedly suggested that Lantier believes himself to have no self-control, believes himself to be predisposed to barbarity, only because it absolves him of blame, action and responsibility. The film's aesthetic, suggestive of the dreamy, dark patches of the human subconscious, captures Lantier's sense of reflexive impotency.Renoir was one of the leading voices in the Poetic Realism "movement", a "movement" which functioned as a precursor to cinema verite and Italian Neorealism. For this reason, "Beast" has a rather unique aesthetic. Renoir had actor Jean Gabin actually learn to drive trains, strove for a certain documentary realism, forbid the use of false backdrops, film sets and in-studio trickery and piled on the dirt and grime. His capturing of "mundane moments" and his use of gritty "slice-of-life" vignettes would influence everyone from Visconti, to De Sica, to the British kitchen sink dramas of the 50s/60s, to the new Hollywood Neorealists of the 70s, and his innovative use of vehicle camera mounts (cameras affixed to the tops, sides and fronts of trains; possibly influenced by Buster Keaton's "The General") would prove wildly influential on later film-makers.This being Renoir, the film is also hugely sympathetic to the working class. In his youth, Renoir was something of a political activist, and throughout his life expressed firm left-wing, even Communist leanings ("Life Is Ours", "The Crime Of Mr Lange"). Indeed, many of his films shamelessly championed the proletariat, portrayed the middle and upper classes as villainous parasites and touted capitalism as an enemy of social progress. Renoir's "Grand Illusion", "The Human Beast" and "The Rules of the Game" are themselves often viewed as a loose trilogy, moving from the anticipations of a classless society ("Grand Illusion") to an assault on the ruling classes ("The Rules of the Game" and also "La Marseillaise") to an overwhelming admission of defeat ("The Human Beast"). In this regard, the characters in "Beast" aren't just condemned, they're condemned at birth, doomed to remain in their allotted grooves and destined to pay for the follies of those above them. And though it opens with title cards assigning deterministic rationalisations for Lantier's barbarous fits, "Beast" ultimately discounts such beliefs and instead makes social context a more plausible driver. It is class consciousness that drives a character called Roubaud to send Severine to the aristocratic Grandmorin in a bid to save his job, it is the offending of a rich customer that leads to Severine's husband losing his occupation and Severine herself not only sells her body and exploits her obvious feminine charms, but exploits the authority that comes naturally from her higher, in relation to Lantier, social position. The film's climax, in which Lantier suicidally leaps from a train, was itself often read in the 30s as being an allusion to the failure of socialism, though in the Emile Zola novel upon which the film was based, it signalled the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War.Still, "The Human Beast" is much less political than Renoir's other works, largely because it was one of the few projects which he did not initiate himself. Today the film plays like a precursor to early American B-movies and crime dramas, though Renoir gives his archetypes a reality, depth and warmth not typically found in those genres. Incidentally, Fritz Lang would remake this film with "Human Desire" in 1954. His version is much less interesting than Renoir's. More successful is Claire Denis' recent "35 Shots of Rum" - another film about the invisible, psychological undertows weighting down society's under-classes - which owes a huge debt to Renoir's work here.8.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

Jean Gabin is a locomotive engineer with a face like a melancholy squash and he's in love with his engine, "Losin." His slouching figure, slightly shabby clothes, pale hair, pale eyes, and pale skin aren't exactly magnetic but neither are they offensive. He's middle aged. So why doesn't he have a wife, or even a sweetie pie? Well, there's this thing about his brain. In the opening scene we meet a disheveled, slightly dim-witted blond who doesn't object to showing her legs. She's stupid but earthy and attractive. She's been in love with Gabin for a long time but when she kisses him he begins to strangle her. He manages to rein his impulses in, but spurns her. He loves only Losin. Women are not his demitasse.Or so he believes until he meets the seductive minx, the diminutive and somewhat flighty Simone Simon. Then it gets complicated. Simon is married to an overbearing murderer. Gabin doesn't want to get involved but, well, he does, and it leads to tragedy.It's an enjoyable romantic drama although it's not a masterpiece. The plot could have come from any Hollywood studio's B movie unit. The director is Jean Renoir, widely acclaimed, but to argue that because he is a genius, everything he directs must be great, is to commit what psychologists call the fundamental error of attribution. Yet Renoir (son of the painter) has done a fine and artful job with some difficult material. It's difficult because the relationships among the network of characters is a little too rich to be captured in movie time. And the characters themselves can only hint at the depth I imagine (or hope) they had in Zola's novel.You know something? Gabin's love for his locomotive was a little nutty, true, but at least it was safe. On the other hand, when it comes to sex, locomotives are a poor substitute for human lovers. Gabin should have stuck with that dumb blond.

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.