La Bete Humaine

Jean Renoir says he took on this job of directing because he and Jean Gabin wanted to play with trains, and certainly that is the best aspect of this film. The celebrated opening sequence reminded me of the great British documentary Night Mail, in its meticulous depiction of Gabin actually driving a locomotive from Paris to Le Havre. He was the big star, and Renoir the hired hand in this instance, and the film was a relative hit for a director who would always have trouble getting his own films made, despite his exalted status in retrospect. Though at an early age he knew the novelist as a friend of his painter father, Renoir is not a very logical choice to adapt Zola. While both might be considered realists, Renoir’s humanism (for lack of a better word) is not conducive to Zola’s determinism, so the film does not make much sense. It definitely has the flavor of the railroad milieu, but the characters are all unconvincing in their behavior and the story has inexplicable gaps. It’s amusing to read reviews in various film guides, because they all get details of plot wrong, and I think the film is to blame for that. Some praise Gabin’s acting, but I found it uncharacteristically opaque and wooden (he looks the part “behind the wheel,” however.) Simone Simon is piquant but hardly a vamp, or a proto-noir femme fatale, as her character is sometimes described. Despite the engaging train footage, this film is more period piece than still-living drama. (1938, dvd, n.) *6-*