La Bête Humaine

1938
7.5| 1h40m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 23 December 1938 Released
Producted By: Paris Film
Country: France
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

On board a train bound for the port city of Le Havre, France, railroad stationmaster Roubard murders Grandmorin, who seduced his beautiful young wife, Severine. Engineer Jacques Lantier, stuck in Le Havre while the train is being repaired, also begins a passionate affair with Severine, who tries to entice the handsome stranger to murder her controlling husband. However, Lantier has a secret urge of his own that changes everything.

Genre

Drama, Crime

Watch Online

La Bête Humaine (1938) is currently not available on any services.

Director

Jean Renoir

Production Companies

Paris Film

La Bête Humaine Videos and Images

La Bête Humaine Audience Reviews

Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away
Flyerplesys Perfectly adorable
Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Richie-67-485852 I recently saw the remake of this which was rather interesting and found it entertaining. Then, this came and I decided to see it so I could compare both versions. They are different and I liked them both with both having subtle and pertinent differences all good. This one is a French film and one must take that into consideration when watching for this very important reason. It is not uncommon for the French culture to support marriage and at the same time having a lover on the side too. This applies to both spouses and not necessarily endorsed or supported but perhaps tolerated for reasons I don't care to explore. With that in mind, the movie has more meaning in certain scenes. I enjoyed the trains of old and who doesn't like a good movie with trains in them? Objectively speaking, it is shocking what men and women will do when it comes to sex and lust. Nothing is off the table when the desires of the flesh are activated and then unleashed. Many a murder, robbery and perversion is done in this mindset and for those few moments people literally go out of their minds, lose all reason and let their inner beasts out to play and cause harm. Once completed, shame and guilt visit until either one repents (changes in the Greek) or has to have another fix. Being addicted to dysfunction is a curse and can only end one way. Repentance on the other hand leads one to a better way and literally away from the fallen deed or mishap. This principal is acted out and shown quite well in this movie. Good sandwich (French bread) movie and a tasty drink with some chocolate recommended while watching. The nature of the human always makes for good story telling
Benedict_Cumberbatch "La Bete Humaine", also known as 'The Human Beast' or 'Judas Was a Woman', is the third Jean Renoir film I have had the privilege to watch, a couple years after 'The Grand Illusion' (1937, possibly his most celebrated work) and 'The Rules of the Game' (1939, probably my favorite of the bunch).The 1930's was considered by many to be Renoir's most creative period. 'The Grand Illusion' was the poignant story of two officers of distinct social backgrounds captured during World War I, while 'The Rules of the Game' was a sharp analysis of the French bourgeoisie and their servants at a château during the onset of World War II (a premise that would inspire Robert Altman to craft his beautiful 'Gosford Park', sixty-two years later). 'La Bete Humaine', based on Emile Zola's novel of the same name, is a more intimate work; not an ensemble film, but a fascinating story of love and crime that preceded the classic film noir.Jean Gabin, one of the greatest of all French actors, plays Jacques Lantier, a train engineer who falls for the deceitful Severine (Simone Simon), the young wife of Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), his co-worker. As Roubaud finds out that Severine has had a long-term affair with her wealthy godfather, Grandmorin, they both plan to kill him on a train journey. An innocent passenger is convicted for the murder instead, while Lantier, the only witness to the crime, remains quiet. He begins an affair with Severine, who then tries to persuade him to kill Roubaud. Lantier, however, suffers from hereditary mental instability and unpredictable violent fits, especially when under the influence of alcohol, and things might just not go the way the femme fatale has planned.The locomotive is one of the main characters in the film. It serves as Lantier's home, workplace, and only refuge, and also where his tragic bond with Severine begins. It's more than a visual prop and a metaphor to his state of mind/life, since it comes alive on the screen in a most unusual way - the splendid cinematography by Curt Courant only adds to it. The original novel (part of a large series by Zola, which includes 'Germinal', also adapted to the big screen) was supposed to take place in the late 1800's, but the film adaptation is a clear product of its time, and, just as Renoir's war-themed stories ('The Grand Illusion' and 'The Rules of the Game'), it represents and foreshadows a dark period for a nation's whole history and humanity (World War II was indeed about to begin).At once, a great early film noir of sorts and a profound character study about human qualities, flaws and needs, 'La Bete Humaine' is a beautiful piece of work. Fritz Lang would remake the story as 'Human Desire' (1954), starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford; a film I have yet to see. Still, I find it hard to believe it could surpass Renoir's vision - and I consider myself a Lang fan.
jzappa 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.
blanche-2 Jean Renoir's "La Bete Humaine" (1938) stars Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in an adaptation of Emile Zola's novel. Renoir's novel is part of a series following a family. Lantier (Gabin) suffers from an inherited illness, possibly a chemical dysfunction. He's given to violent outbursts. He falls for the beautiful and childlike Sevarin (Simon) who, with her husband, kills her lover. Lantier witnesses this. Sevarin wants him to help kill her husband.This is a beautifully photographed, bleak story with the symbolism of the railroad (Lanier is a railway engineer) running through it. Gabin is terrific as the tragic Lanier, and Simone Simon is effective as the woman.Fritz Lang's later film "Human Desire" is also based on the Zola novel, but the Renoir version has more layers, particularly in the characterizations.Highly recommended.

More Film noir Movies