La B?te Humaine
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Product details
Actor: Blanchette Brunoy, Charlotte Clasis, Jacques Berlioz, Julien Carette, Tony CorteggianiPrimary Contributor: Julien Carette
Primary Contributor: Jean Gabin
Primary Contributor: Simone Simon
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, NTSC, Subtitled
Running Time: 75 minutes
Release Date: 1997-12-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Timeless Multimedia
Studio: Timeless Multimedia
VHS Movie Reviews of La B?te Humaine
Movie Review: Renoir's La Bete Humaine
Summary: 5 Stars
Jean Renoir's moody adaptation of Emile Zola's book features one of Gabin's seminal pre-war performances, and an arresting turn by the sexy Simon (who'd venture stateside four years later to make "The Cat People"). Renoir's vivid location shooting around trains and train stations portrays the dusty anonymity of one isolated man, while serving as metaphor for a numb, bewildered nation about to enter the dark tunnel of occupation. A stunning, unsettling film from an acknowledged master.Movie Review: Weird film, but the ride on the train was great
Summary: 3 Stars
Jean Renoir made his version of Zola's novel. What is fun here is the fabulous sights we see while on the train thru France. Beatiful b&w photography, mind you.
Now, the story I didn't quite get it. I didn't get to care too much about the afflicted engineer; his psyche is really weird to me. Then there's his relationship with the unorthodox femme fatal, for whom I didn't care much either. So the study of characters isn't the best one I've seen in film history.
In brief, boring but beautiful. There are better Renoir films to choose from.
Movie Review: trains, trains, and more trains
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the first symbols they teach you about in film critic school (Symbolism Clich?s 101) is the big, black locomotive, which represents male sexual libido. Blame Freud and, well, your id. Man is a sexual beast and his dreams - the manifestation of an unconscious mind allowed to conjure any vision fathomable - are mostly the repeated image of his own sex organ.
Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) has a lot of locomotives, so many in fact that it probably slots in between The General and Murder on the Orient Express on the all-time list of most locomotive-saturated frames per minute of running time. Those pictures, perhaps surprisingly, are relatively free of sexual menace (though the Agatha Christie adaptation features the always phallic death by stabbing, if you're so inclined - a little more on this later). The same cannot be said of Humaine, a film that doesn't just feature the darker elements of our carnal natures, but is consumed by them.
Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin from Renoir's own Grand Illusion) is a train engineer. His dirty clothes and ashen face camouflage him with the locomotive on which he rides - man and (sex) machine appear as one. A faulty axel on "Lison" will foreshadow Lantier's own "mechanical" problem where he visits a lady friend and attempts to have his way (where else?) beside some train tracks; overcome by feelings of inadequacy in the face of (what we can only presume) an inability to consummate, he throttles her for his own impotence. A passing train interrupts his manic and violent outburst and Lantier is immediately regretful, blaming some ambiguous and undiagnosed disease of the blood he believes was passed to him from grandfather to father to son. "Is that part of your illness?" she asks him. She means the hands that were about her throat and not the passing train, though she might as well have.
The other doomed man of this story is amiable stationmaster Roubaud (Fernard Ledoux), introduced as he reprimands a rich man for walking his dog on the train platform. It might be petty but Roubaud shows no favorites regardless of class or connections. "Some people need to be taught a lesson," says the woman who brought the complaint. Roubaud agrees, or at least thinks he does. As is usually the case, the person that brings about his eventual downfall is Roubaud himself... but he has an accomplice.
Enter his much-too-pretty-for-a-schlub-like-him wife, Severine (Simone Simon), who spends her days tending to caged birds on their balcony (whose symbolism need not be elaborated upon), shopping, and cuckolding poor, naive Roubaud with the men of the neighborhood. One of these men happens to be an individual of some social standing and a former employer, Grandmorin - Roubaud's discovery of this wealthy man's intimate knowledge of his wife infuriates him to the point of premeditated murder (by stabbing, the modus operandi of every sexually frustrated killer) aboard - you guessed it - a train. Unfortunately for Roubaud, a witness in Lantier is standing a few feet away when the crime takes place and the fate of two men become intertwined.
Though not to the extent of his Upstairs/Downstairs farce La Regle du Jeu, Renoir here is overtly aware of class relationships and class warfare (one memorable scene takes place as the train workers scrape their dinner out of cans, congratulating each other on how much money they saved their bosses on coal that day - the technology that brings us together also divides), even expressing some welcome cynicism at the working class hero vs. robber baron boiler plates that tend to dominate. Roubaud does not want Grandmorin's "cast offs," a strange thing to call one's wife no matter how far she's been passed around. He does, however, have no problem taking the dead man's wallet - only to deflect blame and the attention of law enforcement, of course (and wouldn't it be a waste to just throw out all this money?).
Later, Severine (whose infidelity prompted the original bloodshed) is practically gifted to Lantier by her husband, an exchange for the man's silence. Inevitably, when a budding romance blooms between the two, it does so at night in a lamp-lit train yard. Peering up at a big, black locomotive locomotive, Serverine asks Lantier "May I get on?" "You'll get all dirty," he says.
Indeed.
Interesting footnote: Director Jean Renoir is the son of famed expressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was the subject of many of his father's works in which he is often portrayed, at best, sexual ambiguous, and at worst, as a girl, resulting in much childhood torment at the hands of bullies. See the painting Jean Renoir Sewing for one particularly egregious example.
Movie Review: Possibly Renoir's finest film
Summary: 5 Stars
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!Movie Review: A full package
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not a great fan of Renoir, but here his style works well. He's good at photography, and usually weak on story flow - too loaded with sentiment. This heavy theme works well under his control. The print is generally good, and the extras are copius and very interesting. The psychological depictions feel authentic. Gabin's character is difficult to understand. This is not a flaw, because he is like so many real people I've encountered, difficult to understand because of their internal conflicts. His conflicts have been controlled and muted by limiting his life's focus to the train. Although his sidekick sometimes border on the "straight man", he never quite goes over the line. It contrasts well with the deep darkness of Gabin's character.
In summary: A great movie, a good repro, and a fine disc set.
Summary of La B?te Humaine
This 1938 adaptation of a rather schematic and melodramatic novel by ?mile Zola wasn't a personal project for the writer-director, Jean Renoir, but he made it his own, and it retains the power to shock over 60 years after its original release. This was a star vehicle for working-class hero Jean Gabin that Renoir molded into something pungent and powerful, a story of a curse of brutality that has been handed down in a family from one generation to the next. (The codependent psychology, if not the mood of doomed determinism, may seem more timely than ever.) The working environment of the protagonist, the railroad mechanic Lantier (Gabin), is depicted with great precision; we can just about smell the coal smoke. And the sequences in which Lantier succumbs helplessly to his inherited inclinations are as terrifying as any of the famous murder passages in Hitchcock. For a man with such a high reputation for gentleness and tolerance, the cinema's great humanist was very good at violence: it's worth recalling that almost all of his major and many of his minor films pivot upon vividly imagined brutal crimes. Nothing human was alien to him, not even the pathology of this loathsome "human beast." --David ChuteGeneral Video
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