La Bete Humaine - Criterion Collection
by Jean Renoir
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Blanchette Brunoy, Charlotte Clasis, Jacques Berlioz, Jacques Brunius, Julien CaretteDirector: Jean Renoir
Brand: IMAGE ENT.
Cinematographer: Curt Courant
Composer: Joseph Kosma
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language); English (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Full Screen, Mono, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-02-14
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Product features:
- Based on theic Emile 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 suspen
Movie Reviews of La Bete Humaine - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: This is one beast of a film...
Summary: 5 Stars
A startling look at the inner demons of mankind, Jean Renoir's tragic film noir `La Bete Humaine' is one of the finest additions to cinema. It is equal parts chilling and seductive, with powerful performances, stylistic direction and heart-racing tension. `La Bete Humaine' is a perfectly concocted film that covers nearly every base with a clear vision that is destined to stain your soul.
The film tells two different stories that intertwine to make one very concise and profound tale. We have Jacques Lantier (a brilliant Jean Gabin), a train engineer who has a very mysterious and apparently violent past. He has no relationship outside of the one with his train, but there is a reason for that. On the other hand we have Severine (a stunning and utterly delicious Simone Simon) and her jealous husband Roubaud. When Roubaud finds out of a previous relationship he finds distasteful he takes matters into his own hands and commits a heinous crime, a crime that Jacques finds himself privy.
The film straddles the line of thriller and film noir with its tasteful handling of the chemistry between Gabin and Simon. There is a restrained theatrical tampering with their love affair (the stills this movie creates with the two of them standing side by side are so in your face yet breathtakingly quiet) that really gets my temperature rising. It's a beautifully handled love story that really unravels at a velocity I find stunning.
The film appears to completely ditch the development of Lantier's violent past when Roubaud commits murder, but this is a clever diversion to something that is growing and growing with each scene. We are taking away from the point of the film through a series of beautifully paced scenes involving Severine and her husband so that when Jacques succumbs to his obsessions we are blown away by the outcome.
But should we be?
I have not read the novel from which this film was adapted, but my appetite has been wetted. There is a marvelously crafted story here of the mind. The mind is a very complicated gift, and this film takes no precautions in portraying that mind as something unexplainable and truly contradictory. I love the fact that one is almost left confused by the ending, as if the story is incomplete, but it is that incompleteness that really elevates the tale and is precisely the point.
Sometimes there are no explanations for our actions.
Summary of La Bete Humaine - Criterion Collection
Based on the classic Emile 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 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 Eugene Lourie.This 1938 adaptation of a rather schematic and melodramatic novel by ?mile Zola wasn't a personal project for the writer-director, Jean Renoir, but he made it his own, and it retains the power to shock over 60 years after its original release. This was a star vehicle for working-class hero Jean Gabin that Renoir molded into something pungent and powerful, a story of a curse of brutality that has been handed down in a family from one generation to the next. (The codependent psychology, if not the mood of doomed determinism, may seem more timely than ever.) The working environment of the protagonist, the railroad mechanic Lantier (Gabin), is depicted with great precision; we can just about smell the coal smoke. And the sequences in which Lantier succumbs helplessly to his inherited inclinations are as terrifying as any of the famous murder passages in Hitchcock. For a man with such a high reputation for gentleness and tolerance, the cinema's great humanist was very good at violence: it's worth recalling that almost all of his major and many of his minor films pivot upon vividly imagined brutal crimes. Nothing human was alien to him, not even the pathology of this loathsome "human beast." --David Chute
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