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La bête humaine (1938)

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Jean Renoir creates a contained noir thriller out of Emile Zola's novel, La bête humaine, in his 1938 film adaptation, set in the (then) present day as opposed to the end of the 19th Century. It is the story of a jealous railway employee who kills a man, and the train engineer who looks the other way and winds up falling in love with the murderer's wife. If my English-speaking readers don't know Zola, think of him as Steinbeck's French precursor, and so it is impossible for the characters to escape their class/family-mandated destinies, no matter how hard they try. Inevitability drives this well-acted melodrama. The train is, in fact, more than a simple backdrop, but a symbol of Zola's brand of literary naturalism. It goes back and forth between two places, but can never deviate from its tracks. The film's characters are thus doomed to repeat the history they want to escape from, and touchingly, they know it. 5 years 4 months ago

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