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La bete humaine



Based on the classic Émile Zola novel, Jean Renoir's La bete humaine was one of the legendary director's greatest popular successes, tapping into the fatalism of a nation in despair. Jean Gabin's emblematic portrayal of doomed train engineer Jacques Lantier granted him a permanent place in the hearts of his countrymen. Part poetic realism, part film noir, the film is a hard-boiled and suspenseful journey into the tormented psyche of a workingman.

Special Features

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the original uncensored version
- Introduction to the film by Jean Renoir
- New interview with director Peter Bogdanovich
- Archival footage of Renoir directing actress Simone Simon, and interviews with Renoir, Émile Zola scholar Henri Mitterand, and others on adapting Zola to the screen
- Theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- A booklet featuring critic Geoffrey O'Brien, film historian Ginette Vincendeau, and production designer Eugène Lourié

Criterionforum.org user rating averages

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Looking forward to this one. Simone is growing on me having recently watched Devil and Daniel Webster and Cat People.

Gabin is great in it... It's Renoir's take on Zola's novel, distinguished by the performances and also his visceral sequences of the steam train in motion....

Any new extras besides those already in the French Studio Canal release?

We don't know... the Renoir intro plus plus - they didn't leave us short on BOUDU...

I rented the UK disc a few months back. I love authentic shots from trains and this film has some of the very best. I expected the film to have been darker, grimer more pessimistic and I was slightly disappointed, but the messages of the somewhat familiar story are clear and powerful and Gabin's performance is wonderful. I don't think that I'll buy the Criterion edition, but I am glad to see it finally receive a classy R1 release, as it has been long-awaited.

This is excellent News! I can't wait to see what Criterion do with this film.

Details posted:

# New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the original uncut version

# Introduction to the film by Jean Renoir

# New interview with director Peter Bogdanovich

# Archival interviews with Renoir discussing his adaptation of Emile Zola's novels, his process with actors, and directing actress Simone Simon

# Gallery of on-set photographs and theatrical posters

# Theatrical trailer

# New and improved English subtitle translation

# A booklet featuring writings by film critic Geoffrey O'Brien, historian Ginette Vincendeau, and production designer Eugène Lourié

Just to say- anyone passing through Paris should catch the Renoir/Renoir exhibition at the new Cinematheque Francais... I went twice last week - some superb juxtapositions of the work of pere et fils... Jean R film extracts projected alongside Pierre Auguste R's original paintings, plus copious stills and other material... Interesting stills from the shoot of LA BETE HUMAINE - one particular of Claude Renoir slung in a special mount right down alongside the wheels of the steam loco... Catalogue is great too...

Arrgh
More black borders!

What is going on here?? (this question--put more politely and diplomatically--just dispatched to JM)

I have to say the VIRGIN SPRING disc was crystal clear - really great image for me, just fitting the screen and negligible black borders, so I'm looking forward to LA BETE HUMAINE... I'm sure the print is better than one Warner Uk used for their OOP DVD transfer, which had several jumps, where frames were missing...

I'd place money on this new wave of windowboxed 1.33:1 presentations being due to people emailing JM and crying "you're cropping the transfers!" without providing the necessary elaboration.

I'd place money on this new wave of windowboxed 1.33:1 presentations being due to people emailing JM and crying "you're cropping the transfers!" without providing the necessary elaboration.

I seriously doubt it. I've emailed JM about the cropping on Discreet Charm and Gertrud and his response is: check your display, you've probably got overscan problems. Why would they try to preempt such complaints about films that are in the correct AR, but be ignorant about the ones that are not in the correct AR?

denti alligator wrote: Why would they try to preempt such complaints about films that are in the correct AR, but be ignorant about the ones that are not in the correct AR?

Are they ignorant of it or just denying it?

Does anyone know the name of the piece of music used for the opening of all the 1960s Renoir intros?

Matango wrote:Does anyone know the name of the piece of music used for the opening of all the 1960s Renoir intros?

If I recall correctly, it's the "Summer" section of Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons ... but I may be thinking of the intro music for the Cinéma de notre temps programs.

EDIT: I checked one of my discs. It is the Vivaldi (Summer, movement 3, marked Presto).

I've been catching snippets here & there about many individuals being disappointed with this film-- I wanted to comment, to express, despite my awe & respect for this film, my lack of surprise that someone might feel unmoved by BETE HUMAINE... at least in comparison to Renoir's better-known masterpieces ie REGLE, GRANDE ILLUSION, BOUDU, RIVER, etc. BETE HUMAINE being a stately piece of uniqueness in my opinion, neither noir nor straight melodrama, and certainly not your standard piece of French Poetic Realism a la Carne & say, DuVivier's PEPE LE MOKO. BETE has a bit of an unforgiving surface to it, kind of dour & lacking in the joyful mutual humanities usually resident in the tragedy of other Renoirs (at least those that are tragedies) & which expose the gentle soul of the man at their helm. It also has an unusual setup and tempo which may create problems in getting viewers invested in Gabin's character... i e we meet him zooming a train... a few minutes & few words later he's "inexplicably" trying to strangle a beautiful young blonde slamming her head into the dirt.

In the moral wasteland of the tale-- everybody (except maybe the great Julien Carette's Pecqueux... what a great straight-dramatic turn he puts in here) being guilty & sleazy in some way-- I can see some viewers having a problem figuring out How To Feel... doesn't linger softly on moments of beautiful sadness a la QUAI DE BRUMES, for example, allowing music to blend in gently & gather melancholy meaning.. god knows there's ample opportunity for the film to do so. Yet I think it's to Renoir's credit that he didn't do so-- to me it tips the films cap of respect to the blue collar stateliness of Gabins character, the lack of any joy resident in his melancholia, the tragedy of the events being too awful for poetry. This is life as lived outside of left bank poetry cafes. So, for those with a greater receptivity to the symbol order and sensitive to all the streams of feeling running beneath the stately veneer-- as well as the rock solid editing, crisp direction and looming performances-- the film is an absolute Towering Masterpiece.

My own feeling is that it's timelessness might have been slightly better served if the mechanism of his violent flashes were rendered to slightly more understanding, rather than an Opening Flash and a Closing Flash bookending the film. The issue may have been underemphasized owing to the Zola novel being better known & carried about somewhat in the minds of contemporary viewers... but viewing it today, these snaps of psychosis feel slightly "off" to me, and I'm not exactly sure what it is that this guy "has". I think the issue in and of itself was far more sympathetically handled in DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST.. but of course he's a drinker, whereas Gabin in BETE is not... making his snaps a bit curious.

Christ is this guy jean-Marc Moreau one hell of a telecine operater. You look at his portfolio of VDM-CC films & they're all sterling pieces of transfer work... what a sense of contrast-- from BETE, to QUAI ORFEVRES (some of the most immaculate contrast I've yet seen on a DVD), PASSION JEANNE D'ARC, the list goes on.

i've seen all his movies released by criterion and I think it's his best film. It's possible that I simply forgot how great Grand Illusion was because it's been about 3 years since I saw it, but these two are great movies.

Renoir is a great artist. I found this film to be very satisfying.

After I had almost forgotten about the film, I had the great pleasure of seeing the CC of "La bete humaine" now (incredible transfer, really), and the somewhat curious experience of watching it more or less side-by-side with the CC of Carné's "Port of shadows", which I finally grabbed along with it after a long wait, spurred on by the news of the Studio Canal titles going out-of-print. Interestingly, Renoir called the Carné film 'reactionary' and even proto-fascist, and while I find that an overstatement, I begin to see where he came from when directly comparing the two films. Most striking is the difference in Gabin's acting. Gabin never was one of my favourite actors, but I find him completely overwhelming in "Bete humaine". Whereas in "Port of Shadows" he is more or less a 'type', a flat character who delivers his usual hard-boiled, somewhat bullying even when finally 'romantic' performance, in "Bete humaine" he is able to display all sorts of subtleties and acts in a much 'quieter' and more difficult to 'read' way. For me it is precisely the fact that we never learn exactly WHAT he suffers from (unless you except the heriditary explanation) and WHY he has these moments of depression and psychosis which makes his portrayal of this angst-ridden character so convincing. Lantier cannot be pinned down as he's constantly and unexpectedly changing, and likely running away from himself (thus the train in the film takes on a symbolic meaning as well).

I'm pretty sure the difference in Gabin's acting must be due to Renoir, and although others have said otherwise, I think it's a very typical Renoir film in the differentiation and also the intellectual approach the director brings to this somewhat conventional story. "Port of Shadows", by contrast, is all emotion and atmosphere, which you may like or not ( I certainly do) , but its melodrama doesn't help you to empathize with or even 'understand' the characters properly. "Port of Shadows" is indeed all fog and shadows, whereas Renoir – as always – is 'crystal clear' (literally in its deep focus photography, almost as amazing as in "Rules of the Game"). Renoir probably had this fatalistic 'clouding' in mind when he criticized Carné.

All this makes it difficult for me to lump "La bete humaine" together with the Carné under the heading of 'poetic realism' or even see it as a precursor of Film Noir. It's just not 'generic' enough. Or indeed, as Schreck says above, the difference between life and "left bank poetry cafes".

Just watching Fritz Lang's fascinating Americanised take on Zola's story - HUMAN DESIRE (1954)... Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame standing in for Jean Gabin and Simone Simon, in a more melodramatic rendering of the tale, tinged with a touch of Noir... It's good, but comes nowhere near Renoir's masterpiece...

Yes, in the final scene the husband jealously kills his unfaithful wife (the Severine character) in a carriage of the train, while the Glenn Ford railwayman (the Lantier character) is happily driving the locomotive, having previously thrown over the girl and content in himself to be free, somewhat blunting the effect of the tale... Effectively the morality had to be clear cut, and in no way ambiguous, but as you say Grahame and Ford do a fine job in spite of this... It's eerie to see similar scenes to Renoir's film played out on hurtling trains and in the railway yard - the juxtaposition of the drama with the railways.... The alterations are almost undoubtedly the work of the Censor Joseph I Breen, the manic Irish American conservative Catholic who ran the so called Hays Office from 1934 till 1954, having script approval, and indeed virtually final cut on everything Hollywood turned out in the period, to ensure it was decent and morally acceptable... It was after all he who tried to ban outright in the US Korda's LADY HAMILTON (THAT HAMILTON WOMAN) because it portrayed an adulterous affair without retribution, despite its historical basis....

david hare wrote: It's always a sad tale, and perhaps Renoir's point, and Lang's, is at this level of socal poison, personal corruption, and entropy is a classical trope in the endless stories of people.

Very true, David, the 'poison' (both social and personal) is what turns ordinary people against ordinary people, rather than elevating them against the system, and it seems the 'poison' cannot be got out their/our system...

Interestingly Renoir (and indeed Lang too) left out the ending from the novel, where Lantier and his fireman fight and fall from the speeding locomotive to their deaths, leaving the train which is carrying drunken, partying and patriotic troops headed for the front (in the Franco Prussian War) hurtling on driverless through the night towards inevitable disaster... Updated from Zola's 1890 to Renoir's 1938, it would have had equal resonance, but I suppose would have overshadowed the drama of the personal...