La bête humaine

The dark literary brilliance of French author Émile Zola’s naturalistic 1889 masterpiece, La bête humaine, could never have been translated satisfactorily to the screen, but Jean Renoir’s effort comes very close. Telling the story of a deadly love triangle that seems to illustrate the beast-like urges that were soon to terrorize the world in war, the film stars Jean Gabin as soot-faced train engineer Jacques Lantier whose blue-collar physicality and inexplicable, murderous instincts plainly position him as the beastliness that lurks in all of us. Having witnessed conductor Roubad (Fernand Ledoux) and his young wife Séverine (an adolescent-looking Simone Simon) exiting a train compartment just after a murder had taken place, Lantier hides this fact from the police to win the affection of the coquettish, young wife who pulls Lantier into a love affair and attempts to steer his violent tendencies in ways that will benefit her. Visually, the film contains little expressionistic wonder compared to the contemporary poetic realism of, say, Marcel Carné, but nevertheless serves up a visual weightiness that reflects our grim reality (note, for example, the bedraggled Lantier trudging through the rail yard toward the film’s close). While Renoir’s adaptation emphasizes the almost cosmic weight of this romantic tragedy, Fritz Lang would later direct a more hard-boiled, American version in his 1952 Human Desire.