For many Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is the great film. Deeply human, funny, true, and deeply engrossed in the techniques of screen storytelling it’s a case study in pure cinema. It is also supreme work of Art. Made just before Rules, La Bete Humaine shares the same values and offers a similar kind of excitement as its much more famous successor in the oeuvre of Renoir. As the title in English makes plain, The Human Beast is a much darker piece than Rules, dealing as it does with a passion that leads to death.
Made in 1938, much of it on location, and based on a novel by Zola, La Bete Humaine seems in many ways a forerunner to film noir, at least within its narrative contours. Here is the lethal geometry of a love triangle and a flawed but essentially decent man who yearns to escape his life and whose sexual desire is manipulated by a femme fatale (its alternative title in English was Judas as a Woman).
Still there’s nothing noirish at all here about the setting or indeed the sociology. The action takes place in a provincial working class environment of railroad men and their small lives that seem to run on strict timetables. By virtue of his powerful personality Jean Gabin’s engineer, Jacques is a natural leader. Troubled by headaches that lead him to fits of uncontrollable violence, Renoir sets up Jacques as doomed from the outset. Sex and death are intermingled when Jacques becomes the alibi for a murder and then falls in love with a killer - the beautiful Severine (Simon). In Renoir, this is indeed an unholy union and can only lead to further tragedy. The characters are limited human beings, but their longing for something better is sad and honest (and it takes the edge off the basic misogyny of the plot set up).
A brief break down of the plot can hardly do this superb film justice, its qualities are so deep and rich, not the least of which are its incidental pleasures; like the subtle textures of Curt Courant’s black and white photography (much of the films action is shot doco style on high speeding steam locomotives). And of course the acting is brilliant. Don’t miss it.
