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Powerful

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This film creates a sordid picture of man as a pawn of other people and fate. The human being may distract himself along the way but he's basically just putting in time before death arrives.Jean Gabin plays the stolid train engineer who is plagued by a murderous hereditary ailment. He is drawn to women who are ambivalent about love and he is always on the verge of killing them.One day he does the world of women a favor and jumps off the train that has been his closest companion in life.Wow...it's not exactly a popcorn movie. But it does keep one's interest. One keeps on wondering where it's all leading.Director Jean Renoir hands in a very entertaining cameo of a man wrongly accused of murder.I watched this movie with a friend with whom I could discuss the twists and turns. It helps to have someone nearby to try out one's theories...

In all his splendid career, Jean Gabin can seldom have acted better than in 'La bete humaine' (= French for 'the human beast'). I do not exaggerate when I label his performance as breathtaking.Apart from this, 'La bete humaine' is an excellently made film. Competent acting, to start with -- for instance by female lead Simone Simon, a forgotten name. This film's setting in a French railroad-environment adds the right amount of drama, and provides a solid foundation for its plot. According to the technical standards of 1938, its shooting is first-class.'La bete humaine' is a novel from the Rougon-Maquart-series by the great French author Emile Zola. Back in the second half of the 19th century, Zola wrote 'naturalism': an ultra-realistic style with a bottom-line of pessimism. Coincidence or not, this style fits well with the year 1938, when Adolf Hitler's dark shade was already looming over Europe.

Well, I'll be damned – it seems that the French did invent film noir, after all! In Jean Renoir's 'The Human Beast (1938),' the noir mould, thematically if not stylistically, is virtually complete. When a husband and wife (Fernand Ledoux and Simone Simon) murder the wife's wealthy lover, one witness – Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), a mentally-unstable railway driver – threatens to expose their secret. To protect herself, the wife quickly seduces Lantier, and attempts to maneuver him into murdering her abusive and controlling husband. The following year, Renoir produced 'The Rules of the Game (1939)' as a "pleasant" film about a society that he believed had become rotten. There's no such pleasantness to be found in 'The Human Beast,' in which even the prettiest, most innocent-looking woman is capable of evil (in an introduction recorded in 1967, Renoir remarks that he chose Simone Simon for the role precisely because she seemed perfectly innocuous).Simone Simon, gracefully seductive in her natural tongue (as opposed to her stunted English in 'Cat People (1942)'), is a classic femme fatale. Jean Gabin's performance is also good, though his character is afflicted with an unlikely psychological condition: for no sensible reason, Lantier occasionally feels the need to throttle the women in his life, a psychosis that is so poorly explored (beyond vague allusions to a family history of alcoholism) that it serves merely as a clumsy plot device. Throughout the film, Lantier spends large amounts of time with his locomotive "La Lison," which is lovingly photographed in action during a wordless opening sequence. Renoir intended the train to be interpreted as a third party in a twisted love triangle also involving Lantier and Séverine. However, I never really got the sense that the train was a major, animate character; perhaps this was more clearly established in Émile Zola's 1890 novel.

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.