La Bête humaine

In this adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel, Jean Gabin stars as the unstable train driver, who engages in a passionate affair with an unhappily married woman, played by Simone Simon. She is stuck in an unhappy marriage with a domineering and violent man and hopes to escape him through her lover. An important portion of this macabre film is set in a driving train, which sets the tempo of the movie and the unsettling feeling that heads towards the audience during the film.

“Forty years after the invention of movies, Jean Renoir managed to re-create the astonishment that greeted the 1898 Lumière movie of a train arriving in a station. LA BÊTE HUMAINE is often described as an exemplar of the pessimistic poetic realism of the thirties in France, and as a precursor of forties film noir, but it begins on a note of heroic exhilaration, in which the natural world and the power of technology are wedded through the closely coordinated labor—effected through glances and sign language—of two men.” Film writer Geoffrey O’Brien hits the nail on the head. And if you add one femme fatale to the mix, you get a heart wrenching story about three people and their demise.