Simone Simon and Jean Gabin

La bete Humaine

This 1938 french film directed by Jean Renoir is a bleak tale of a railroad engineer (Jean Gabin) and his affair with the abused wife (Simone Simon) of a railroad supervisor (Fernand Ledoux). From a long list of bad choices come even worse ones as these characters wrestle with an emotional claustrophobia that keeps closing in on them throughout the tale. The film is based somewhat on the Emile Zola novel from 1890.

I can see why Simone Simon was typecast in later roles in American films as a destructive femme fatale, apparently based upon this film to some degree. Here there is a human side to her nihilism (her husband is a slapping, hair-pulling brute) and her frivolity is the proverbial 'eat and drink for tomorrow we die' view that seems to crop up more often in films based on Russian source novels.

Jean Gabin controls the screen whenever he appears, and though this is the only film I have seen this actor in, I can appreciate how he is considered one of the most popular actors in French "classic" film history. Gabin's self-assured character in La bete Humain ("The Human Beast") is on a collision course with mortality (and not just his own) and the result is something that is halfway emersed into the depression era films of gritty reality, and also looks ahead toward noir films of the later 1940s. Le bete Humaine is something of a proto-noir, with an existential attitude about things it doesn't explain, but only implies through the motions of the characters.

Jean Renoir's direction is interesting and uses the black and white tones of the scenes to either box in his characters in shadow (the characters certainly box themselves in with their propensity for murder and mayhem); or Renoir opens up the screen when he wants to show us there is a whole world these actors are living in, and though they are all clenched into self-absorbed tension with the claustrophobia of their lives, other minor actors in many scenes are laughing and enjoying themselves. Its both a contrast, and maybe an unintentional commentary about the angst afoot everywhere else.

Erik 12/1/2009

Updated Dec 17, 2009