La Bete Humaine

The interpretative puzzle posed by Renoir's 1938 crime thriller, La Bete Humaine is simple enough:  which of the characters is afflicted by the "beast within", that is, a wild and uncontrollable passion to inflict injury?  Zola's 1890 novel is exponentially more lurid than Renoir's comparatively restrained film version of that book -- nonetheless, both works ultimately suggest that the "bestial" compulsion described by the title inhabitants everyone.  This is despite an effective misdirection in the film's opening:  We see a long title that declares that certain people have tainted blood -- that is, they are subject to hereditary madness, probably induced by alcoholism in earlier generations.  After the title makes this questionable assertion, we see the words signed "Emile Zola" and the film, then, shows us a portrait of the redoubtable writer.  But this turns out to be a narrative ruse -- everyone in the film is tainted with some kind of evil that deforms their instincts. 

Lantier (Jean Gabin) is a railroad engineer afflicted with a compulsion to murder women.  Severine (Simone Simon) is a coquette married to the stationmaster, Roubaud.  Severine was the victim of a child sex-predator, Grandmorin, who is apparently the owner of the railroad line from Paris to Le Havre,  lodgings and stations associated with the locomotives that roar back and forth between the cities. The entire sequence of calamities is devised as a nightmare imposed upon the characters by a vindictive fate -- the role of the Gods in destroying human beings in classical tragedy is here played by hereditary madness and criminal sexual behavior inflicted upon children.  A woman complains to the apparently righteous Roubard about a dog allowed in a first-class compartment on the train, a violation of the rules.  The dog-owner turns out to be a wealthy and powerful magnate, a sugar baron.  This means that Roubard's job is threatened because of his reproach of the sugar baron.  Severine visits train mogul, Grandmorin, to persuade him from retaliating against her husband, Roubard.  The persuasion seems to involve a sexual encounter.  Roubard learns about this encounter and forces his wife to lure Grandmorin into a private car on the train where he stabs him to death.  An innocent man, Cabuchin, is accused of the crime and, probably, convicted.  Roubard and Severine's marriage decays under the pressure of the murder and its paranoiac aftermath.  Ultimately, Severine and Lantier begin a love affair.  Severine tries to persuade Lantier to murder Roubard.  Lantier can't commit the act.  Later, there is a ball for railroad workers, possibly some sort of fund-raiser.  At the ball, Severine tries to make Lantier jealous.  She succeeds and Lantier knifes her death.  (This murder is orchestrated to a light cabaret song -- the scenes of Lantier stabbing Severine intercut with the smarmy singer, a kind of lounge performer, crooning the cabaret song, an ironic effect that we might expect in a similarly bilious Kubrick film.)  The next day, on the Paris -Le Havre run, Lantier jumps off the speeding train and is killed.  A man stands by his body while the rest of the bedraggled-looking railway workers hike up the right-of-way on the tracks to the waiting train. 

It's pretty clear that Lantier, Severine, Grandmorin, and Roubard all are severely flawed characters, driven by inner compulsions.  (Zola's source novel makes the indictment even more expansive:  there are instances of mad jealousy resulting in fatal train wrecks and, in the final episode, Lantier and another engineer, suicidally jump off the speeding train as it carries drunken recruits to the front during the Franco-Prussian war -- no one is driving the runaway train and, it's clear, that Zola thinks the entire core of French society is bestial and irredeemable.)  The film is noteworthy for its documentary-like images of trains and their locomotives screaming like banshees in the darkness -- as the film progresses, its increasingly clear that the huge black machines full of fire in their guts are symbolic, both representations of the wounded and murderous characters and the Furies, iron Eumenides gushing steam as they roar across the countryside on their missions of destruction.  Renoir's style is simple enough; he uses long takes and the film has a sort of neo-realist appearance -- this is particularly true of the scenes at the Ball and the final images in the film.  In point of fact, the picture is not wholly successful and seems a bit disorganized -- it's sufficiently close to the novel to import into the picture the book's bad ideas (inherited blood lust) while too modestly financed and directed to include Zola's big set pieces involving runaway trains and train crashes.  In a curious way, the picture seems to anticipate both Italian neo-realism and American film noir -- aspects of the movie play like The Postman only rings twice.  The picture contains several iconic images that capture brilliantly the romanticism maudit of pre-war French cinema.  Lantier and Severine make love in a shack next to the tracks -- everything in the movie happens within a few hundred yards of the black and steamy switching yards and the train-stations with their huge iron spider-web train-sheds.  A storm hurls rain down around the lovers in their shack, a proletariat Dido and Aeneas.  A bucket outside the shack overflows.  Then, comes the dawn with a splendid shot of Gabin and Simone embracing and looking off-camera to the sun that is ennobling and gilding their weary features.  Later, after he has killed Severine, we see Gabin wandering disconsolate among the visionary dreariness of the railroad yards -- it's dawn and the hero with burning eyes staggers along an industrial riverside on ragged-looking and filthy train-tracks.  When we first see Severine, she is a cat toying with a kitten in a window frame full of light. (Simone Simon would later be cast as the protagonist in Tourneur's famous 1941 horror film, Cat People.)  The film's operatic realism is impressive and the performances are iconic -- the film's failings are largely those of Zola's overly schematic novel.  There's a great scene, very powerfully acted, in which Severine says that the moment when Roubard stabbed Grandmorin was "most intense experience in her life."  This appalls Lantier who had hoped that his love-making with Severine would achieve that distinction.  He looks at her with wounded horror -- kills her shortly thereafter.