La Bête humaine (1938)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

La Bête humaine marks a significant turning point in the cinema of Jean Renoir, both stylistically and thematically, although its greater significance is the affect that it would have on American film noir of the following decade in the wake of its successful international release. An inspired adaptation of Emile Zola's celebrated 1890 novel (the 17th installment in the author's mammoth Les Rougon-Macquart saga), the film makes a startling contrast with Renoir's previous La Marseillaise (1938), which reflected both the director's solidarity with the working class and his faith in the Popular Front government.  But even before that film had been released, the left-wing coalition had fallen apart and the Popular Front was discredited.  It was inevitable that Renoir's next film would be an intensely gloomy affair which evokes, albeit tangentially, the widely felt disillusionment with socialism in a country whose nearest neighbours were nonchalantly embracing fascist totalitarianism.

Despite its bleaker tone, La Bête humaine can be considered to form a loose trilogy of films with Renoir's two other great films of the decade, La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939).  What connects these three films is Renoir's preoccupation with and contempt for the class barriers which divided French society in the 1930s.  In his youth, Renoir was something of a political activist and made no secret as to where his sympathies lay.  He had expressed his left-wing, even Communist, leanings in films such as La Vie est à nous (1936) and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936).  Whilst championing the proletariat, Renoir would portray the middle and upper classes as villains and parasites, with capitalism cast as the enemy of social progress.  But in contrast to La Grande illusion, which anticipates a classless society, and La Règle du jeu, a scathing assault on the ruling classes, La Bête humaine feels almost like an admission of defeat.  The social archetypes in this film seem condemned to remain in their allotted grooves forever, so that the good working class man and woman with whom Renoir had such a powerful affinity would be doomed forever to pay for the follies commited by those higher up the social scale.

It is interesting that whilst the film quotes Zola's deterministic rationalisation for Lantier's murderous fits (twice in fact), attributing these to a blood illness derived from generations of debauched living, Renoir pretty well discounts this and instead makes the social context a more plausible driver for the story's grim developments.  The tragic spiral that draws in Lantier, Séverine and Roubaud arises from the collision of basic human impulses (subconscious in the case of Lantier) with the social constraints of the time.  It is, after all, class consciousness that impels Roubaud to send Séverine to Grandmorin in a cowardly bid to save his job after he upset a rich customer, setting in motion the locomotive of intense passions that would end in disaster for all.  Séverine exploits not only her obvious feminine charms but also the authority that comes naturally from her higher social position to coax Lantier into doing her bidding and rid her of the husband she has grown to fear and despise.  Lantier's lack of moral conviction is affirmed when, having throttled Séverine, he decides he can no longer go on living.  His suicide leap from an unstoppable train provides a crude metaphor for the failure of socialism in the 1930s.  Zola's novel ended with the train, driverless and laden with drunken flag-waving soldiers, hurtling towards oblivion.  If Renoir had retained this ending, his film would have been even more prescient of the disaster that lay just around the corner for humankind.

Unusually, La Bête humaine was not a project which Renoir himself initiated.  It began with Jean Gabin's desire to fulfil his life-long ambition to be a train driver.  Gabin had written a screenplay entitled Train d'enfer, which he had asked Jean Grémillion - with whom he had just worked on Gueule d'amour (1937) - to direct.  Grémillion was unimpressed by the script and instead suggested an adaptation of Emile Zola's novel La Bête humaine, one of the latter instalments in the writer's monumental Rougon-Macquart saga.  By this time, Gabin had collaborated with Jean Renoir on La Grande illusion and was keen to work with him again, so he asked producers Robert and Raymond Hakim to commission Renoir to direct La Bête humaine.  The commercial failure of Renoir's previous film, La Marseillaise, may have been a factor in the director's decision to accept the job.  His earlier Zola adaptation - Nana (1926) - had been one of his most spectacular box office flops.

La Bête humaine is arguably the most conventional of the films that Jean Renoir made in the 1930s - a familiar crime melodrama offering the obligatory love triangle and some pretty gruesome killings (which conveniently take place out of camera-shot).  It is the closest that Renoir ever got to making what we would now term a B-movie, and its similarity to subsequent American film noir crime dramas is indicative of the influence that it had on the genre.  Yet there is clearly far more to this film than just the usual seedy cocktail of illicit romance and murderous intrigue that makes up your everyday classic film noir.  The main protagonists are easily aligned with the familiar noir archetypes, but Renoir gives them a reality, a depth and humanity, that compels us to sympathise with them.  Lantier, Roubaud and Séverine (skilfully played by Jean Gabin, Fernand Ledoux and Simone Simon) each performs the mortal sin of murdering another human being, but they do so not because they are inherently evil, but because they are all susceptible to a stimulus that cannot be resisted.  Roubaud is driven to kill through jealousy, Séverine through fear and a desire to be free.  Lantier's case is the most poignant - he kills without being consciously aware of his actions, taken over by a mental illness in which his primitive self asserts itself and transforms him into a homicidal savage.  In the classic film noir treatment, Séverine would be the femme fatale, the heartless seductress who drags the hero Lantier unwittingly to his doom, whilst Roubaud would be a stock villain who deserves what he gets.  Renoir avoids such simplistic judgmentalism and instead portrays each of his characters as tragic victims of the beast instincts that lie dormant in each of us.

La Bête humaine also departs from the conventional film noir in its jarring mix of styles.  Prior to this, Renoir had experimented, with varying degrees of success, with a style that we would now term neo-realist.  In Toni (1934), Partie de Campagne (1936) and Les Bas-fonds (1936), the director had made a conscious effort to break away from the polished but somewhat stilted feel of studio-based dramas and capture something of the spontaneity and sunny naturalism of impressionist art, of which his own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had been a leading exponent.  In La Bête humaine, Renoir appears to be torn between naturalism and the poetic realist style that had recently come into vogue, in such films as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938).   The documentary-style exterior shots (including the dramatic opening sequence of a train surging relentless down a set of railway tracks, symbolising the drama that ensues) sit ill alongside the studio interiors, which are lit in an almost expressionistic vein.  The disjointedness of the film's visual style is emphasised by a painfully intrusive score that obliterates much of the subtlety of Renoir's mise-en-scène and risks reducing some of the film's more dramatic scenes to obscene caricature. 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about La Bête humaine is that, whilst it is marred by some obvious stylistic imperfections, its director (assisted by three extremely talented lead actors) manages to somehow pull together a story of extraordinary power and cohesion - one that transcends the very genre it would inspire with its stark simplicity and excruciating humanity.   Fritz Lang attempted a creditable remake with Human Desire (1954), but Renoir's version is much more interesting, not only because the characters are far more sympathetically and convincingly drawn, but also because of what it reveals about its director at a pivotal moment in his career.  This is the point at which Renoir became more interested in individuals rather than their social setting and thereby found a more effective way to express his deepest human feelings.  It is no coincidence that his next film would be his greatest achievement, and an unrivalled masterpiece of French cinema.

Film Synopsis

Roubaud, a stationmaster based in Le Havre, is anxious to get on in his career, and he hopes that in this he might be assisted by Grandmorin, a prominent businessman who exerts some influence over the railways.  Because Grandmorin is the godfather of Roubard's wife Séverine, he is hopeful that the industrialist will do him a good turn.  What he had not bargained on is that Séverine and her seemingly impeccable godfather have been lovers for some time.  When Roubard finds this out he is overcome with fury and murders the businessman during a train journey from Paris to Le Havre, in front of his wife.

Afterwards, Roubard becomes concerned that his crime may have been witnessed by Jacques Lantier, a railway mechanic who was in the train at the time.  His fears are justified, but Lantier has no intention of betraying Roubard to the authorities.  It is to protect Séverine, the woman he has suddenly fallen in love with, that leads Lantier to keep his silence.  Séverine shows her gratitude by becoming the mechanic's lover, but in doing so she knows she is likely to further inflame her husband's jealousy.

Fearing that Roubard may kill them both, Séverine encourages Lantier to rid her of the man she has come to loathe.  Little does she know that the seemingly meek railway worker has a hereditary condition that causes him to become a dangerous killer when a woman arouses deep emotions in him.  Unwittingly, Séverine is about to unleash a primordial urge to destroy that will bring about not only her own death but also that of her beloved Lantier...