Trains, tough guys, tragic doomed romance.The pot's boiling pretty hot 'n heavy here, at least about as hot as it could boil in a mainstream film released in 1938.
We're working with familiar figures here - the face of Jean Gabin, the cinematic mastery of Jean Renoir. This time, Gabin and Renoir team up to adapt a major work of the French author Emile Zola, updating the story of La Bete Humaine from its mid-19th century original setting to become a contemporary drama of its own times, featuring working class figures that audiences were apparently eager to relate to and regarded as novelties as far as screen portrayals were concerned. There aren't any aristocrats or exotic foreign cityscapes to be seen here. This was and is a movie "of the people."
The title translates as The Human Beast, but after watching the film a couple times, I'm not at all clear that it intends to refer to a particular character in the film. I think it works better to characterize the lead roles in the film, or even perhaps humanity in general. The point being, people are complicated, emotion driven creatures capable of both great tenderness and senseless cruelty at any given moment. Renoir, by way of Zola, puts forth a theory or two as to why this is so (hereditary alcoholism, child abuse, early sexual molestation, perhaps more) but knows well enough to not make the "explanations" too obvious or simple. As we've seen in his earlier films in this series, Renoir cultivates an enduring warm affection for his human subjects, while simultaneously avoiding sappy sentimentality or the easy crowd-pleasing urge to divide us up into readily identified good guys and bad guys. I could only wish that more directors followed his cue, but I suppose it's just as well to have films like this exist as a rare and distinct subset of cinematic treasures.
Let's talk first about the beginning of this film - what a spectacular and visually engaging sequence! After a brief literary quote of the great and highly esteemed Zola, the first moving image we see is a bright burning fire in the steam engine's oven, accompanied by a high-pitched shrieking train whistle. Then we get to see two great actors, Gabin and Carette, besmirched in grit and grime, actually operating a real locomotive in live action filmed on a real French railway. These guys studied how to do this and they filmed the scene right on the moving train! Renoir also attached a camera near the front of the locomotive to capture some pretty amazing and fascinating footage, kind of a best-approximation of "virtual reality" as 1930s technology could deliver. I'm not a huge train buff but I totally enjoyed watching these point-of-view shots of trains entering and exiting tunnels, viaducts and the station yards of the port city Le Havre (setting of Gabin's earlier film, Port of Shadows.) It's a real treat to study these moving documents of pre-war France.
Here's the trailer for this "veritable chef-d-ouevre":
The story revolves around yet another ill-fated love triangle - such fertile potentials grow out of such situations! Renoir's introduction has some fun with the formula - he claims that the triangle consists of a man who loves both a woman married to his boss and the locomotive on which he works as an engineer. Fair enough - I won't argue with Renoir! - but more conventionally, we see the engineer Lantier (Gabin), the train station manager Roubaud, and his delectable femme fatale of a wife, Severine (Simone Simon, whose name I include here simply because I love typing it.) Severine is, of course, beautiful, but not born to privilege and thus subject to all sorts of cruel treatment. We learn fairly early on that she was mistreated by her wealthy godfather and it's truly sad to see the kind of mistreatment she's forced to endure at the hands of her greedy, jealous and basically horrible but respectable bourgeois husband. When he learns of the abuse she's suffered, he offers no consolation to her but instead uses her misfortune as the pretext for exacting his revenge for the dishonor that this scandal brings to his own name and reputation.
The lust for vengeance leads to murder on a train, and it so happens that Lantier happens to be a bystander who didn't see the vile deed itself but knows enough to condemn both Roubaud and Severine... if he's so inclined. But he quickly sizes up Severine's interest in getting to know him better, and that's when the heat goes up several notches. As if Lantier's rough-n-tumble occupation as a train driver wasn't indicative enough, we learn in an early scene that he's capable of brutal, random violence, attributable (supposedly) to being the descendant of generations of drunks and debauchees and thus unable to control himself when the savage urge strikes. He comes close to killing his childhood sweetheart, but the fatal spell is broken by the roar of a passing train.
Once the murder attracts the attention of authorities, of course an investigation is launched to nail the culprit, and its here that Lantier seals Severine's affection by reinforcing her alibi and deflecting the law away from her and her husband. A lower-class stooge (played by Renoir himself) takes the rap instead, clearing the way for Lantier and Severine to pursue their own intrigues. Continuing with the train metaphors, their romance picks up steam and goes on to hurtle recklessly down the tracks, destined of course for oblivion, but not before partaking of some smoldering leather-clad kisses on a dark rainy night...
All in all, this is yet another magnificent performance by Jean Gabin, whose portrayal of the disturbed engineer is marked by subtlety and strength. By this point in his career, he had come to practically dominate French cinema as the premier leading man of his time, and brought an appropriately over-sized ego along with him, leaving his second wife in 1939 in order to carry on with Marlene Dietrich, before leaving Europe for the USA following the fall of France the following year. We're not quite to this point in Gabin's story, but he sure does turn in a memorable performance here. I'm not sure he ever got more down & dirty than he did here, but he cleaned up well, showing that always impressive ability to be both the man's man and the ladies' man all in the course of the same motion picture.
I don't think it's spoiling the ending all that much to say that, all in all, it's a bummer! But hey, it's 1938, France and the rest of Europe is on the road to ruin and any story reeking of a happier ending just wouldn't ring true now, would it? The lovers' embraces, small talk and futile plans for a future that will never be ring all the more poignantly in retrospect - I have to figure that audiences of their times saw in this film (which was a huge commercial success) a portent of the calamity and crisis that was about to befall their society - without consciously realizing it at the time, of course.
Here's another clip that focuses more directly on the historic train route itself - a nice little time capsule of days gone by.
The DVD has some very nice features, including a film introduction by Renoir himself (recorded in the 1960s), a recreation of a pivotal scene from the film's later portion in which Renoir demonstrates his directing technique on French TV with Simone Simon herself, and my favorite, a wonderful dialog on the film as only a quartet of balding French intellectual cineastes can carry off - it's this kind of stuff, as well as the top notch attention to detail in the film transfers, audio and so on, that really does set Criterion apart from any other DVD company I know about. It takes an extra degree of commitment to work through these supplements but they really do enhance one's appreciation for what these films accomplished and represented upon first release, and what they say to us now.
Next: Young Mr. Lincoln
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