RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Ploydsge just watch it!

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Tafelberg This is one of those movies where a little thing leads to a cover-up, which leads to bigger things, which have to be covered up in their turn, and so on. It's a working-class morality tale, a cross between melodrama and film noir, and brilliantly compelling.Lantier (Gabin) is an engine driver. Together with his stoker Pecqueux (Carette), a lugubrious man with a cigarette always on his lips and a girl in every depot, they speed though the countryside in a celebrated opening sequence that captures the power and awesomeness of the great steam locomotive (and is an early use of shaky cam).They have time off at the station while the locomotive is repaired. Lantier visits his family where we learn he gets murderous impulses he can hardly control. He nearly strangles the pretty young Flore (Brunoy), stopping only when a train rushes by on the nearby tracks. In fact, the trains are his lifesaver. He knows he is safe from his impulses when he is with "Lison", as he calls his locomotive.Back at the station, the station-master Roubaud (Ledoux) tells off a man with a dog. - What's the problem with my dog? - The regulations don't allow dogs in the compartments. - I don't like your tone of voice. Do you know who I am? - I don't need to know. I make no distinctions among passengers.Alas, it is a sugar baron who can make trouble for Roubaud. He asks his wife Severine (Simon) to pull strings with her wealthy godfather Grandmorin (Berlioz). They can combine this with a shopping trip to Paris.In Paris they stay with Victoria, Severine's mother's friend, who is the lavatory attendant at the station and also Pecqueux's wife. It illustrates one of the strengths of the movie, which shows well the lives and esprit de corps of this group of working men who must move from place to place and stay in railway housing with their colleagues. They are a friendly bunch who know each other and stick up for each other.The perils of having a wife who is too young and pretty for you! In Paris middle-aged Roubaud learns Grandmorin is Severine's lover. Enraged at being cuckolded, Roubaud gets Severine to invite Grandmorin on a train trip, where the couple murder the wealthy man. Lantier is on the train and sees them, but does not give them away. Severine starts an affair with Lantier to keep him quiet, and things go downhill from there.The train photography, Jean Gabin's acting, and the glimpses of railway peoples' lives were the stand-outs for me, but in all departments this movie stands comparison with anything made 75 years later. It's my first Jean Renoir film I've seen. It won't be my last.

LobotomousMonk Hereditary flaw... paying the price... suffering... committing acts beyond one's control... reasons locked deep inside. These Zolaist sentiments and characterizations ironically put the story of La Bete Humaine beyond the poetic realist genre. This film never rises to the surface of atmosphere. Image and sound are emotionally charged from the opening scene. Hi-key lighting and soft focus cinematography on closeups create psychological identification and promote the act of gazing. The camera is often stationary and actions moves past it. Closeups are often one-shots. Renoir utilizes a firmly constructed shot-reverse-shot system. There is deep depth of field in staging but not focus. The planes usually are staged with a mix of people and animals or object (horse, train) lending more power to the psychological identifications that run throughout the film. This form of layering creates elusive effects and provided a difficulty in access and privilege (a theme that perfectly describes the psychological paralysis of Jacques). "Feeling like a mad dog" and "haze fills my head" is rhetoric lending to concepts of mental illness sooner than excuses of hereditary responsibility. The mental illness transcends the social classes (like in Bas Fonds) as the wealthy husband commits heinous premeditated acts. "It was an accident for us" becomes the credo of the characters in the film and ties quite nicely to Renoir's own philosophy of the cork in the stream. Certain avant-garde techniques creep up (the rain bucket ellipsis). The only significant use of Renoir's famous stylistic system is at the end where great depth of field and mobile framing help construct a space similar to how it was accomplished at the end of M. Lange. The supersped up rear projection (or "side projection" in the end scene is the most dramatic visual in the film and in film more generally. The themes of immobility and isolation play perfectly when juxtaposed with the high-paced locomotion. Renoir comments "the locomotive was one of the most important characters" and unfortunately tips his hand about believing that his work does not venture into the realm of the psychological. La Bete Humaine should hopefully soon be considered Renoir's greatest film, but it first requires an understanding of the evolution and development of two stylistic systems of his. This will likely lead to his later work being more revered than it is today.

tieman64 "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." - Lenin Jean Renoir directs "The Human Beast". The film opens with a bravura sequence, beautifully edited, Renoir watching as coal smeared rail-road engineers wordlessly run a locomotive across the French countryside, over bridges, through towns and eventually into the begrimed embrace of a vast rail yard. For a film made in 1937, this sequence feels startlingly modern; an exhilarating cacophony of hand-signals, clattery machinery, angry smoke, competing sounds and of course the train itself, which thunders on like an ink-black monster.After this virtuoso opening, "The Human Beast" settles into now familiar territory. Jean Gabin plays Jacques Lantier, an engine driver who witnesses a murder on one of his trains. The corpse was the wealthy godfather of Severin, the wife of a stationmaster. As he is in love with Severin, Lantier keeps quiet when interrogated by the police. Big mistake. The film then develops into a noirish psycho-drama rife with double crosses, ex-cons, murder, jealousy, femme fatales, sexual manipulations and love triangles. No surprise then that "Beast's" plot often gets it listed as being one of, if not the, first "film noirs", though of course this term wasn't around in 1937. Renoir's film predates the canonised noirs of the classic era by at least a decade.And as with most noirs, a sense of fatalism suffuses "Beast". Lantier suffers periodic fits of homicidal madness, drunkenness and debauchery, all of which he attributes to his similarly debased ancestors. Their blood pumps through his veins, he believes, their bestial behaviour written in his genetic code. Lantier is so convinced that his afflictions are fated, and therefore incurable, that he seems to have confined his life almost exclusively to the driver's cabin of his train. Affixed to its tracks and always thundering along, the locomotive epitomises Lantier's sense of noirish predestination. His only escape? Suicide. The film ends with Lantier violently throwing himself from his train. Only in death can he escape what he perceives to be his life's fixed tracks.But Renoir makes it clear that Lantier is indulging in rationalisations. The train actually soothes Lantier's "hereditary" seizures, and it is repeatedly suggested that Lantier believes himself to have no self-control, believes himself to be predisposed to barbarity, only because it absolves him of blame, action and responsibility. The film's aesthetic, suggestive of the dreamy, dark patches of the human subconscious, captures Lantier's sense of reflexive impotency.Renoir was one of the leading voices in the Poetic Realism "movement", a "movement" which functioned as a precursor to cinema verite and Italian Neorealism. For this reason, "Beast" has a rather unique aesthetic. Renoir had actor Jean Gabin actually learn to drive trains, strove for a certain documentary realism, forbid the use of false backdrops, film sets and in-studio trickery and piled on the dirt and grime. His capturing of "mundane moments" and his use of gritty "slice-of-life" vignettes would influence everyone from Visconti, to De Sica, to the British kitchen sink dramas of the 50s/60s, to the new Hollywood Neorealists of the 70s, and his innovative use of vehicle camera mounts (cameras affixed to the tops, sides and fronts of trains; possibly influenced by Buster Keaton's "The General") would prove wildly influential on later film-makers.This being Renoir, the film is also hugely sympathetic to the working class. In his youth, Renoir was something of a political activist, and throughout his life expressed firm left-wing, even Communist leanings ("Life Is Ours", "The Crime Of Mr Lange"). Indeed, many of his films shamelessly championed the proletariat, portrayed the middle and upper classes as villainous parasites and touted capitalism as an enemy of social progress. Renoir's "Grand Illusion", "The Human Beast" and "The Rules of the Game" are themselves often viewed as a loose trilogy, moving from the anticipations of a classless society ("Grand Illusion") to an assault on the ruling classes ("The Rules of the Game" and also "La Marseillaise") to an overwhelming admission of defeat ("The Human Beast"). In this regard, the characters in "Beast" aren't just condemned, they're condemned at birth, doomed to remain in their allotted grooves and destined to pay for the follies of those above them. And though it opens with title cards assigning deterministic rationalisations for Lantier's barbarous fits, "Beast" ultimately discounts such beliefs and instead makes social context a more plausible driver. It is class consciousness that drives a character called Roubaud to send Severine to the aristocratic Grandmorin in a bid to save his job, it is the offending of a rich customer that leads to Severine's husband losing his occupation and Severine herself not only sells her body and exploits her obvious feminine charms, but exploits the authority that comes naturally from her higher, in relation to Lantier, social position. The film's climax, in which Lantier suicidally leaps from a train, was itself often read in the 30s as being an allusion to the failure of socialism, though in the Emile Zola novel upon which the film was based, it signalled the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War.Still, "The Human Beast" is much less political than Renoir's other works, largely because it was one of the few projects which he did not initiate himself. Today the film plays like a precursor to early American B-movies and crime dramas, though Renoir gives his archetypes a reality, depth and warmth not typically found in those genres. Incidentally, Fritz Lang would remake this film with "Human Desire" in 1954. His version is much less interesting than Renoir's. More successful is Claire Denis' recent "35 Shots of Rum" - another film about the invisible, psychological undertows weighting down society's under-classes - which owes a huge debt to Renoir's work here.8.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

Robert J. Maxwell Jean Gabin is a locomotive engineer with a face like a melancholy squash and he's in love with his engine, "Losin." His slouching figure, slightly shabby clothes, pale hair, pale eyes, and pale skin aren't exactly magnetic but neither are they offensive. He's middle aged. So why doesn't he have a wife, or even a sweetie pie? Well, there's this thing about his brain. In the opening scene we meet a disheveled, slightly dim-witted blond who doesn't object to showing her legs. She's stupid but earthy and attractive. She's been in love with Gabin for a long time but when she kisses him he begins to strangle her. He manages to rein his impulses in, but spurns her. He loves only Losin. Women are not his demitasse.Or so he believes until he meets the seductive minx, the diminutive and somewhat flighty Simone Simon. Then it gets complicated. Simon is married to an overbearing murderer. Gabin doesn't want to get involved but, well, he does, and it leads to tragedy.It's an enjoyable romantic drama although it's not a masterpiece. The plot could have come from any Hollywood studio's B movie unit. The director is Jean Renoir, widely acclaimed, but to argue that because he is a genius, everything he directs must be great, is to commit what psychologists call the fundamental error of attribution. Yet Renoir (son of the painter) has done a fine and artful job with some difficult material. It's difficult because the relationships among the network of characters is a little too rich to be captured in movie time. And the characters themselves can only hint at the depth I imagine (or hope) they had in Zola's novel.You know something? Gabin's love for his locomotive was a little nutty, true, but at least it was safe. On the other hand, when it comes to sex, locomotives are a poor substitute for human lovers. Gabin should have stuck with that dumb blond.