La Bête Humaine (1938)

September 4, 2015 10:31 PM

Le Havre, 1938. A train engineer falls in love with a married woman with a secret: she has helped her husband commit a murder. But the engineer has dark secrets of his own. Doink doink!

In the Criterion On Hulu system, the films are watched by two separate yet equally important groups: the subscribers whose threads post on Mondays, and the non-subscribers who discuss free films on Fridays. These are their stories.

posted by Ian A.T. (4 comments total)

So...I loved this. Like the best noirs, this had a very pleasing nastiness to it that I really dug.

It's funny that I like where the film ended up, though, because I really enjoyed the idyll of the first 30 minutes. I was really hoping it would just keep being about the lives of the railroad employees. Needless to say, I was a a bit shocked by the first turn of events and then the second. But...yeah, I liked where it went a lot.

There were some interesting similarities between this and Cairo Station, and I wonder if they were intentional. Maybe the early 20th century just thought that train stations were a magnet for / cause of lunacy...

The Wikipedia entry has a great story about how this film came to be: the lead actor wanted to be in a movie about trains, so he wrote one himself. (Adorable.) I guess it wasn't very good, so it was suggested they adapt the Zola novel instead.

Also, I'd like to point out that the English title for this was Judas Was A Woman (!)

Finally, in keeping with the Law & Order theme up above, I made this.
posted by Ian A.T. at 12:30 AM on September 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Renoir confessed that at the time when he wrote the screenplay, he had not read Zola's novel in over 25 years: "While I was shooting, I kept modifying the scenario, bringing it closer to Zola ... the dialogue which I gave Simone Simon is almost entirely copied from Zola's text. Since I was working at top speed, I'd re-read a few pages of Zola every night, to make sure I wasn't overlooking anything."
posted by Ian A.T. at 1:30 AM on September 7, 2015

Ian A.T.: It's funny that I like where the film ended up, though, because I really enjoyed the idyll of the first 30 minutes. I was really hoping it would just keep being about the lives of the railroad employees. Needless to say, I was a a bit shocked by the first turn of events and then the second. But...yeah, I liked where it went a lot.

I too was utterly fascinated by the train sequences. Especially the notion that the engineer pays to run the train somehow? I definitely would watch an hour and a half of just French train people doing train stuff. Paperwork included.

As for the rest… I guess my problem is that I couldn't understand Lanthier's attraction to Severine. Or maybe that I didn't find it believable? Maybe it's just that I don't like Simone Simon? I remember I hated her in The Devil and Daniel Webster too.

It's a shame too because I loved the look of this movie. So many great scenes and shots. The whole shot of Lanthier walking down the tracks is just a revelation. I don't have any links to back it up, but my intuition is that a great many shots in this movie, including the tracks scene mentioned above, inspired dozens of directors in the decades to come.
posted by ob1quixote at 2:33 AM on September 9, 2015

I too was utterly fascinated by the train sequences. Especially the notion that the engineer pays to run the train somehow?

I was really curious about how that worked, too! I googled around last week, but I couldn't find anything. I wonder if it was like driving a cab? That is, the engineer pays for the use of the train but keeps the money the train makes? That really doesn't make any sense, though.

There was a neat flip-flop between this movie and L'Atalante: in this one, I was like "oh, this guy isn't an employee...he's an owner operator?"; in the other, it was "oh, this guy isn't an owner-operater...he's just an employee?"
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:03 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]