The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Blistering performances.

Based on the Emile Zola novel of the same name, you of course expect this film to channel the darker sides of man, and show his animal nature. The beginning sequence on the train is brilliant, with the awesome power, noise, and smoke really setting the tone. Unfortunately the rest of the film didn't live up to this beginning. There are issues that stem back to Zola himself, whose theories about the blood line of a family being poisoned by its ancestors were pseudo-scientific at best. The result is that it's hard to believe the violence that at times suddenly possesses the character of Lantier (Jean Gabin). Simone Simon is a treat to watch and suitably underhanded in her dealings with men, but there is something too cool – too lacking in real passion – about the movie as a whole. The two male performances – Gabin's and that of Fernand Ledoux, Simon's jealous husband – are flat. Zola believed that "love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul", and while all of these things are represented by director Jean Renoir, they don't always feel authentic.Also, I don't mean to go off on a "the book was better than the movie" rant, particularly as the novel itself wasn't Zola's best work, but I would point out that one of the more memorable parts in it was the slow poisoning taking place in a house near a train crossing, and this was a story line that was one of those excised by Renoir. He is also sloppy about other parts of the novel, and when I read later that his screenplay was rushed and that when he started filming he hadn't read the novel in 25 years, I wasn't surprised. It's not horrible by any means, and in some of the train imagery you can see Renoir's influence on films like 1985's "Runaway Train" with Jon Voigt, but it fails to live up to its potential.

Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (1938) is classic Renoir. It is a very well thought out, and very well executed piece of cinematic storytelling with a very interesting, and compelling storyline, and it has high entertainment value as well, in my opinion.The cinematography is particularly good in this film. The use of various camera positions, and camera angles is very effective, and adds real depth to the film, as well as do the great close up facial shots that so dramatically relate the expressions of the actors at appropriate points in a scene. The extensive footage of "all things railroad" are memorable, including footage in the railroad stations, in the rail yards, of close up footage of the trains sailing down the tracks, and camera positions seemingly right on the very front of the train showing the oncoming tracks rapidly approaching, all this being appropriate, of course, because most of the main characters are train company employees.The acting by the whole cast is really great, but Jean Gabin, and Simone Simone both give particularly strong, and effective performances. Jean Renoir himself gives a rather interesting, and effective performance as Cabuche, a good natured, working stiff who is wrongfully accused of the murder that causes the whole story to spiral into tragedy.This film has some of the characteristics of a classic Shakespearean tragedy, with characters seemingly chained by the stars to their inalterable fates.Viewing this great film will always be memorable for me.

The two most noted elements of Jean Renoir's classic "poetic realist" precursor to film noir are indeed the two elements I felt worked more as ends in themselves than seminal features of the story. They are the use of the train as "one of the film's main characters," as Renoir himself describes, and the characterization of Simone Simon's "femme fatale." There is genuinely palpable sensory vibrance in the extensive book-ending sequences of Jacques, played by Jean Gabin, and his best friend utterly obsessed by manning a steaming, chugging locomotive as it speeds down railroads, in and out of pitch black tunnels, and blackens their faces with the smoke it incessantly pumps into the sky. The flames of the furnace, the peripheral landscape speeding by. We have the feeling not of watching reality but of being occupied by it, a feeling prolonged as we experience, as if for the first time, the impact of abruptly emerging from a tunnel, ultimately screeching to a halt in the linear spectacle of a vast rail yard.I suppose the speeding train is supposed to spark the fierce percussion that outlines the film. Other than these two extended set pieces, La Bete Humaine is a succession of mercurial sketches. It all flows from labor and of the limited time stolen from labor. It's a film of hurried transitions, where all appear to be perpetually passing through doors or climbing stairs or peering out windows. Volumes are spoken when the seductive wife of one of Jacques' colleagues is greeted into her lustful godfather's study while the door is warily closed behind her. A reckless Jacques flees the dance hall unobserved by the dancers, engrossed in their ecstasy. I was intrigued that we see the moments before and after all the murders and seductions but not they themselves. So many crisp exchanges of glances. The blackening impact of a wife's chance admission is found in the way she and her aggressively jealous husband can't bear to look each other in the eye.Uncharacteristically of me, I found the remake much more affecting. Fritz Lang's Human Desire is, to me, the stronger film in terms of character. La Bete Humaine gets its themes across in its own restless way, but the result is lightweight in effect, while Lang's 1954 version is unyielding in depicting the spiritual isolation of the characters. He punctuates the dramatic action with threatening shots of the many railroad tracks interlacing and breaking away. He needs not brandish any certainty of intention for them to act as metaphor for the characters' paths tying themselves in knots. Lang remained in the shadows as a more effective way of showcasing a distinctive style. Strait-jacketing its insight and intensity, Human Desire is the more resonating parable for the shadows of human rationale and the distortion of the heart, and of desperate characters who lead disappointed lives.Renoir cast Simone Simon as the adulterous wife at the center of Emile Zola's falling house of cards. He posits that the cute, innocent, kittenish women are the ones to watch out for because you are so enamored with their sweet and endearing nature that you would never suspect them of manipulating you. Well, that is very true. All of us, men and women alike, have encountered a female of this deceptive kind. She is a femme fatale in her own right. But Simon remains in the role of an exotic object, rather than meeting the male characters on their own level, the way Gloria Grahame does in Human Desire. Grahame was always seductive enough to make you crazy, but so audacious. There wasn't a demure bone in her ferociously sexy body, but that made her even more effectively cunning and guileful. She came at her male puppets headlong, and matched their presence as well as their wits.Grahame and Glenn Ford remain sympathetic in their own respective ways, though one is in some sense a champion and the other is an adversary, just like Gabin and Simon here, but Grahame and Ford evoke a more lucid understanding of their desires, and in the face of the cruelty and ruthlessness in getting what they want, regardless of how far they unravel each other's darkest colors, despite the scorpion-like sidestepping around their flirtatious relationship. Accordingly, Human Desire is a boldly familiarizing study of the sense of right and wrong, achieving its shadowy effect by aiming for your heart and loins rather than only your cerebrum. The development of the drama in La Bete Humaine could be totaled in roughly ten or fifteen close-ups. Renoir just bulks up the lonesome hardships of his three central characters in a wholly animated world of locations and things. If one doesn't totally take in the materiality of the rail yards, rooming quarters and dance halls, the incessant coming and going on platforms and in corridors, the buzz and capricious commotion grinding amidst any personal dilemmas, we can barely be so involved in the uninvited and unconscionable devastation brought down on the three jinxed protagonists.At any rate, in its own right, La Bete Humaine is a fine piece of stylized realism about disillusionment, done with an embellished aestheticism that, while it draws more attention to its representational elements, is still what gave Renoir's great films Grand Illusion and The River such beauty, humor and vitality. It is best to see this film unfettered by Fritz Lang's later adaptation, to take into account all of the fixations of its own time and culture without any outside influences, to see it as its own (human) beast.

Well, I'll be damned – it seems that the French did invent film noir, after all! In Jean Renoir's 'The Human Beast (1938),' the noir mould, thematically if not stylistically, is virtually complete. When a husband and wife (Fernand Ledoux and Simone Simon) murder the wife's wealthy lover, one witness – Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), a mentally-unstable railway driver – threatens to expose their secret. To protect herself, the wife quickly seduces Lantier, and attempts to maneuver him into murdering her abusive and controlling husband. The following year, Renoir produced 'The Rules of the Game (1939)' as a "pleasant" film about a society that he believed had become rotten. There's no such pleasantness to be found in 'The Human Beast,' in which even the prettiest, most innocent-looking woman is capable of evil (in an introduction recorded in 1967, Renoir remarks that he chose Simone Simon for the role precisely because she seemed perfectly innocuous).Simone Simon, gracefully seductive in her natural tongue (as opposed to her stunted English in 'Cat People (1942)'), is a classic femme fatale. Jean Gabin's performance is also good, though his character is afflicted with an unlikely psychological condition: for no sensible reason, Lantier occasionally feels the need to throttle the women in his life, a psychosis that is so poorly explored (beyond vague allusions to a family history of alcoholism) that it serves merely as a clumsy plot device. Throughout the film, Lantier spends large amounts of time with his locomotive "La Lison," which is lovingly photographed in action during a wordless opening sequence. Renoir intended the train to be interpreted as a third party in a twisted love triangle also involving Lantier and Séverine. However, I never really got the sense that the train was a major, animate character; perhaps this was more clearly established in Émile Zola's 1890 novel.