LA BETE HUMAINE (76)

Directed by: Jean Renoir (1938)

Starring: Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux, Julien Carette

The Pitch: A psychopathic train driver is infatuated with a married woman, and gets involved with her after witnessing her husband kill another man out of obsessive jealousy.

Theo Sez: A film told in peals of thunder - both the boom of trains, regularly roaring up out of nowhere, and Renoir's amazing use of music, having it suddenly overwhelm a scene in thunderous crescendos echoing the sudden fits of violence within the hero (it goes way beyond melodramatic effect : the onrush of sound calls up something massive and demented, all the malign forces - bad genes, unhappy childhoods - dwarfing the characters themselves). It's an early film noir, with obvious thematic similarities to IN A LONELY PLACE - flawed hero losing heroine due to uncontrollable rogue streak - but also something of Renoir's wry, supple worldview : he complicates matters with a positive first impression of the brutish husband (seen standing up to a pushy passenger, long before we know who he is), incidentally aligning him with the hero - both decent men undone by unreasonable passions - and adds a remarkable, poetic-naturalistic look at life on the railways (the grimy yards and monster locomotives, drivers sharing hastily-cooked suppers in small-town stations, a workers' dance with its shabby streamers and cardboard cut-out of a train), incidentally adding shade to the hot light of violence. Edges towards hysteria as it strays into James M. Cain territory, followed by downbeat fatalism in the late-30s French manner, but mostly it's a revelation : pert, feline Simon washing round the bruised, sad-eyed figure of Gabin, with sex in the air and trains exploding through the night. Who'd have guessed RULES OF THE GAME was next?...