“Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” - Jean Renoir (1936)

Jean Renoir’s great films of the late 1930s have such a rich social complexity to them that they are sometimes summed up as reflecting his overall “humanism” – although I’m not sure that term does full justice to what Renoir accomplished. Certainly his films encompass multiple layers of fraternal camaraderie, social expectations, and romantic love that involve a number of interacting characters; and these films often have a depth that goes beyond the conventional cinema fare. In fact the first time one sees one of these films, it is easy to miss just how adroit Renoir’s cinematic expression was in these works. Cinematically, Renoir is able to convey multiple subjective perspectives, sometimes all in the same frame of an extended moving-camera shot.  Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), was an early oeuvre in this series, and it also happens to be one of Renoir’s more controversial offerings.

In some ways Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was Renoir’s most overtly political film.  Renoir’s generally leftist sympathies are in clear view in this work, which was made during the ascendancy of France’s Popular Front, a coalition of leftist political groups, including the Communist Party, that won the 1936 general election.  Renoir, himself, was affiliated with the Popular Front, and in that same year he also made a documentary film, La Vie Est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us) that was funded by the Communist Party.  But what makes Le Crime de Monsieur Lange particularly controversial is not so much its leftist sympathies, but its apparent justification of a murder (“le crime”) that was presumably done for social well-being.  (This may evoke some thoughts in your mind concerning the American government’s drone-empowered assassinations of foreign villains, but I will leave that topic aside here.)

The story of the film, as you would expect with Renoir, is more than just a political narrative, and it includes several romantic relationships. It is framed as a story told in flashback: an account of the circumstances that led up to the murder.  One can think of the plot as comprising five main sections, but the three inner sections make up the bulk of the film.

1.  Framing the Story (6 minutes)
A car drops off a man and a woman (we later learn their names -- Amèdée Lange and Valentine Cardès) to a hotel near the French frontier, and they check in for the night.  Immediately the hotel owner’s son recognizes the male guest as a wanted criminal, and suggests to the other hotel workers and patrons in the lobby they turn him in to the police.  During the ensuing discussion, the female guest comes out to the lobby and says that she will tell their story to all of them and that they can then judge what action they may want to take.

2.  Batala’s Publishing House (37 minutes)

The first section of the film presents the social situation at a local building courtyard that includes a small publishing run by Paul Batala, a laundry run by Valentine, and a rooming house managed by a concierge (Marcel Levesque) and his wife. The principal characters introduced here are

• Batala (Jules Berry) runs the publishing house, which is trying to get out its first issue of a pulp detective magazine. It is soon evident that Batala is a dishonest and unreliable manipulator, swindler, and womanizer.
• Lange (René Lefèvre) works for the publishing house.  He dreams of being a successful writer, and his nights are spent writing stories about his fictional creation, “Arizona Jim”.
• Edith (Sylvia Bataille) works for the publishing house and is Batala’s (current) woman.
• Valentine (Florelle) runs the laundry in the same courtyard buildling.
• Estelle (Nadia Sibirskaïa) is a pretty young woman working at the laundry.
• Charles (Maurice Baquet), the son of the concierge, is a bicycle delivery man and in love with Estelle.

As is typical with Renoir, the romantic involvements are many.  Batala had a past relationship with Valentine, is currently involved with Edith, and eventually forces himself on Estelle and impregnates her.  Edith loves Batala and will do whatever he says.  Lange is interested in Edith and Estelle, and later in Valentine.  Valentine is interested in Lange.  Estelle loves Charles, but shies away from a physical relationship.  Depicting the evolution of these relationships occupies the bulk of this part of the film. 

This section closes when the hopelessly in debt swindler, Batala, learns that his creditors are taking legal action against him that may lead to his imprisonment.  So Batala heads out of town on the train.

3.  The Worker’s Cooperative (20 minutes)
News reports indicate that Batala has been killed in a train crash, and the company’s creditors swarm into the publishing house demanding payment. The company staff propose that a worker’s collective be formed to run the business, and the chief creditor, M. Meunier’s son, readily accepts the idea. Soon the rejuvenated company is flourishing by publishing Lange’s “Arizona Jim” comics, which become huge bestsellers at all the newsstands.  The “team spirit” of the collective leads to social harmony and effective, cooperative work. 

Everyone is happy now.  Lange and Valentine have become lovers, and so, too, are Charles and Estelle.  Arizona Jim is such a success that the collective gets a film contract, and they decide to throw a party to celebrate.



4.  Batala Returns (14 minutes)
As the party begins in a dining room in the courtyard, Lange goes upstairs and discovers the presumed-dead Batala dressed as a priest and rummaging around in the company office. To Lange’s horror, Batala announces that he has returned to take what is his.  He says he owns all the rights to the company, and he intends to take over again and dissolve the worker cooperative. This is the corrupt 1% restoring its privileged ownership over the 99%, and Lange sees the idealistic dreams of the collective dissolving before his very eyes.  After Batala goes out into the courtyard and starts coming on to Valentine, Lange  rushes out and shoots Batala with a gun.  M. Meunier’s son offers to whisk Valentine and Lange away from the murder scene and take them to the border in his car.

5.  Closing the Frame (2 minutes)

We return to the present, with Valentine now having concluded her story to the hotel staff and awaiting their verdict: will they turn them in or let them go?  The closing shots reveal what that decision is, with Valentine and Lange making their way on foot along a windswept beach and across the border to safety and an unknown future.

The most evidently controversial issue with Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is whether it endorses committing murder for the common good.  But in fact there are several interesting aspects of the film worth considering, both with respect to the cinematic elements and to the larger themes presented. With respect to the cinematography, Renoir’s emerging virtues are on display. This includes shooting in depth, featuring multiple, active personages coming in and out of frame within a single shot.  In this respect there are several moving camera shots that have drawn considerable attention from critics, most notably during the murder sequence.  During that approximately three-minute scene, there are several closely joined shots that make the entire sequence seem almost like a single shot.  Film scholars have been particularly interested in the shot of the actual shooting, which includes a 270-degree reverse pan shot  [1,2].  In that shot, the camera has Lange initially in frame; and then as Lange moves away to the right, it pans to the left, in the opposite direction of Lange’s movement.  This pan shot sweeps quickly around the empty courtyard, finally winding up on Lange again, who is now in front of Batala.  Why did Renoir choose such a bizarre camera movement at this critical movement?  Some critics have suggested that Renoir’s pan was intended to incorporate the social perspective of the collective (the sounds of the celebratory party can be heard on the soundtrack throughout this shot) so as to make the murder an act of “the people” and not just that of an individual [1,2].  I rather doubt this interpretation.  Renoir’s pan here is quite rapid (perhaps too rapid) and not the sort of deliberative and circumspective movement that would incorporate all that it surveys into its overall perspective.  It is true that the shot does distance the viewer from Lange at this decisive moment, thereby building up dramatic tension, but whether the shot truly incorporates a socially communal perspective is doubtful.

Another interesting cinematic take with respect to this film is to compare its overall tone with Marcel Carne’s Le Jour se Léve (1939):

• Both films were scripted principally by Jacques Prevert. 
• Both films are told in flashback about a murder that has just been committed.
• In both films, the murdered man is an unprincipled and almost satanic shapeshifter stylishly played by Jules Berry.  The seemingly only way to thwart this treacherous threat is to kill him off.

Despite these similarities, the two films seem quite distinct to me.  Le Jour se Léve, the superior film, is a moody, existentialistic story about love. The viewer gets inside the head of the later film’s protagonist, François, and empathizes with his concerns and anxieties.  With respect to Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, however, the perspective is more socially inclusive, and although the viewer sees the Lange character sympathetically, the view is primarily from the outside.  Thus  Le Jour se Léve is more subjectively romantic and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is more objectively political. Given the fact that Prevert scripted both films, we can assume that this distinction between the films largely reflects the differences between Carne’s and Renoir’s cinematic visions and styles of visual storytelling.

In fact this is what makes Renoir so interesting.  His cinematic storytelling style often incorporates multiple perspectives and is consequently both romantic and political at the same time.  But these two perspectives are not just stuck together in an ad hoc fashion without coherence; instead, these two angles seem to fit together into a larger human landscape.  Most critics and film scholars have focused on the political side of things, but the romantic side of this film is at least as important.  Thus there are viewers (in fact, sometimes even a single viewer on different occasions) who have liked this film for quite different reasons.

Consider the difference between the men and the women in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.  The three principal women, Valentine, Sylvia, and Edith, are all totally supportive and loving.  They are selfless, committed, and loyal to the individual men that they love, even when they, themselves, are ignored or abused.   The men, however, are quite the opposite.  Batala is good-tempered, but is also a selfish opportunist and willing to exploit anyone else in order to promote his own comfort.  The courtyard house concierge seems foolishly harmless, but he consistently espouses racist views and dismisses Asians (whom he had earlier encountered in the French “Tonkin Campaign”), Indians, and Blacks as stupid and lazy.  Charles is tolerably naive but totally focused on his own welfare.  Lange wants to do the right thing, but lives in a dream world of cowboys who right wrongs with a six-gun.  This kind of “solution” won’t work in the real world, and we know that Lange’s murder is a profoundly wrong way to deal with the complex, interleaved corruptions of modern existence.  In fact there is a disconcerting escapism that permeates the world around Lange.  Lange is troubled when the news of Batala’s death comes over the radio, but Valentine puckers up to him and says, “what about me; am I alive?”  And when the undesired child of Estelle and Batala is stillborn, there is only a momentary frown expressed by those around her.  In fact shortly thereafter Lange decides to incorporate that incident into one of his comic book stories, and he projects what will happen to one of his characters in his imagined story –  “Estelle, led astray by the sordid hooded fascist had a certain amount of luck: the baby died!”

So what are we to take away from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange?  Certainly we can’t endorse Lange’s murderous act, even though we know that this simple-minded man wanted to remove a miscreant whom nobody would miss.  Was the worker’s collective also such a simple-minded dream that it could not really work in the real world? According to Renoir’s optimistic presentation here, it could work, and this is where his inclusive humanistic vision comes into play.  The collectivist idea could work on a larger scale, but only if the socially collectivist structure is supported by the willing, compassionate engagement that underlies the spirit of this movie.  The political solution will not work without the romantic spirits, and this romantic spirit is most movingly expressed by the women in Renoir’s film, not the men.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Reader, Keith, “The Circular Ruins? Frontiers, Exile and the Nation in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” (2000), French Studies, vol LIV, No. 3, pp. 287-297.
2. O’Shaughnessy, Martin, “Breaking the Circle: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and the Contemporary Illegibility of the Radical Text” (2011), South Central Review, 28:3, pp. 26-44.

"The River" - Jean Renoir (1951)

After fleeing war-torn Europe and coming to America in 1941, Jean Renoir experienced mixed successes and increasing artistic frustration with the Hollywood studio system. By 1948 he was having difficulty finding financial backing for his films, but he finally managed to get funding from one-time-only producer Kenneth McEldowney to film Rumer Godden’s semi-autobiographical novel of her youthful experiences in Bengal, India, The River. The resulting production of the film, which was released in 1951, was remarkable in several aspects. The film was shot on location in India, and it represented something of a landmark in the presentation of India on film to Western audiences. It was also Renoir’s first color film, and also the first color film to be shot in India. The Technicolor filming process was complicated and required significantly more artificial lighting than black-and-white films, so that shooting such a film outside the confines of the big studios represented a significant challenge.

Godden’s stories had been film before, notably with Black Narcissus (1947), but on that occasion she had been unhappy with the alterations made to her original story by Powell and Pressburger. With The River (1951), she was engaged to co-script the film, and although significant changes were introduced in the story, the alterations were in accord with Godden’s original themes. Of no less importance, is the fact that the production of The River was instrumental in launching the careers of two youthful, first-time production assistants who later became seminal figures in Indian film history: writer-director Satyajit Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra.

Over the years The River has been widely praised, but it has also been dismissed by just as many viewers as simply a mundane coming-of-age story about a teenage English girl and her first crush. Indeed most of the characters are European, and the Indian location merely seems to be a backdrop for some colorful location footage. Modern viewers might also be put off by the sympathetic presentation of privileged English colonialism. An additional drawback and perhaps even more of a hindrance to one’s viewing enjoyment is the very uneven and awkward dramatic performances of the amateur actors in the film. Presumably for budgetary reasons Renoir employed amateurs in many of the roles, and the timing of their dialogue scenes is often wooden and artificial. Despite these glaring weaknesses, though, there is more to the film than first meets the eye. I have seen The River three times now, and on each occasion I have come to appreciate it more.

What elevates the film for me is its philosophical character; and in this connection India is not just a backdrop, it is very much a thematic element of that narrative. The story is told by a mature narrator, a professional author, who is reflecting on her early experiences as a teenager. It is true that she was living a privileged life during the Raj, but the cultural influence of India and its Hindu practices shape the way she perceives many of the events around her. An interesting sidelight on this philosophical theme is that one of the principal characters in the film, the half-Indian girl Melanie, is played by Radha Burnier, who besides being a professional dancer was (and still is) a major figure in the Theosophical Society [1].

Although the story seems very simple, there are a number of characters and some interesting narrative turns.

1. Introduction (35 minutes).
The setting is a colonial estate in a village along one of the tributaries of the Ganges River in Bengal. There is no evident time period identified in the film, and when a war veteran (Captain John) appears, the viewer will probably naturally assume that reference is being made to World War II. However, Rumer Godden was born in 1907, and given the autobiographical elements to the story, and the fact that the teenage protagonist, Harriet, is about fifteen years old, that reference is probably to the First World War. Anyway, the India shown here is timeless, so the precise dating doesn’t matter.

The focalization in the film throughout is seen through the eyes of the protagonist Harriet, who introduces the characters at the beginning of the story. She is the oldest of five sisters and has a young brother, Bogey, about seven. Her father manages a jute mill, and her mother is pregnant, expecting another child. There are some Indian servants, including a nanny who looks after all the children and a stern Sikh doorman who guards the front gate of the estate. Their widowed neighbour, Mr. John, had an Indian wife, and early on in the film, his daughter, Melanie, returns home from boarding school after a long absence. Harriet has a close friend, Valerie, who is the daughter of the owner of the jute mill (never seen) and who, at about eighteen years of age, is perhaps a bit younger than Melanie.

Soon the lives of the three teenage girls are enlivened by the announcement that Mr. John’s American cousin and war veteran, Captain John, is coming for an extended visit. When he meets Captain John, Harriet’s father graciously offers that “if you stay long enough, . . . we’ll get you a shot at a tiger”. Such were the days of the British Raj.

2. Rivalry (21 minutes).
With the introductions out of the way, the visual metaphors come into focus. The ordered, cloistered life inside the estate walls is surrounded by the exotic outside world of India – a world that is crowded, complicated, and full of mysterious things. Thus there is a striking visual contrast between the familiar patterns of our everyday world and the mysteries lying in wait just beyond those borders. The recollecting narrator recalls how fascinating the village life was and the way it mixed so many different patterns of life. The sacred river is the unifying image of this world, literally and metaphorically. It brings so many people together along its banks and it symbolized the endless flow of life and death. But there is also one element from this exotic world that exists inside the estate compound – an enormous pipal (banyan) tree. These often huge, complicated trees, with their branches that can drop down to the ground and take root, are almost forests in themselves. It, too, represents the disorderliness of the exotic and unknown outside world. Bogey spends his time with a native Indian mate exploring the corners and shadows of this forest area and trying to be its master.

Harriet and Valerie are both quickly smitten by the attractive Captain John. He is invited over to the estate to celebrate the traditional Indian Diwali festival of light. Captain John, however, has not come to India for romance, but to run away from the traumas associated with his having lost a leg in the war, and he walks with an artificial limb. He is now a lost wanderer, unable to come to grips with the fact that he is diminished and not a normal man.

Melanie is attracted to Captain John, too, but has her own issues. As a mixed-breed individual, she feels that she doesn’t belong to any society. In Indian society she is casteless and therefore at the bottom. In Western society (this was back in the period when white racism was rampant), she is seen as “black”. Despite her culture and beauty, she feels that she doesn’t belong anywhere.

3. Frustrated Desires (24 minutes)
Conflicts now begin to erupt. Valerie exposes Harriet’s secret diary, with its romantic descriptions of Captain John, to the man they both desire. But Valerie’s aggressiveness backfires when her sporting challenge to Captain John makes him fall, reminding him of his disability and souring their relationship. Meanwhile Bogey, pursuing his obsession to emulate a snake charmer he had seen in the village, locates a cobra hiding in the pipal tree and tries to charm it with his flute.

All three girls have their own romantic longings for Captain John, and various tentative encounters take place that are blocked by self doubts and social inhibitions. Although Captain John seems genuinely attracted to Melanie, it is the aggressive Valerie who succeeds in forcing the issue and invoking a romantic embrace in the forested estate garden. At the end of this section, only frustration prevails. Melanie and Harriet are crushed to witness Captain John kissing Valerie. Valerie, herself, is disappointed that expectation exceeded the fulfilment. And then Bogey is found dead in the garden from a snake bite.

4. Reconciliation. (19 minutes)
After the sad and moving funeral for Bogey, everyone is melancholy. Captain John and Melanie have a heartfelt talk about life, and Melanie asserts that the only solution is to consent to what is. Captain John resists such passivity and affirms his refusal to accept a diminished role for himself.

Harriet, who had known about Bogey’s snake-charmer obsession, blames herself and decides to end her life. She hires a boat at night, floats in it down the sacred river, and then jumps overboard. But local fishermen rescue her, and Captain John goes out to the dock to meet her. When they talk, they both accept that they can still live fully within the bounds that life has set for them.

A distinctive feature of The River is the commingling of the multiple characters into a common theme. There are five significant goal-driven characters whose narrative threads are interleaved in the story. Each character has his or her distinctive stance towards the world at large:

• Bogey wants to conquer the world in the fashion of his imperialist forbears. He is confident that he can master the snake-charming technique and gain control of the cobra.
• Valerie is narcissistic and self-confident. The world revolves around her, and she wants to grab whatever she can for her own self-indulgent pleasures.
• Captain John doesn’t want to accept what he must: the unavoidable restrictions imposed on him by the physical world.
• Melanie is an outsider, but feels she can do nothing but “consent” to what the world has dictated to her. But these restrictions are socially-imposed by ignorance and not by physics – they should be resisted.
• Harriet is the dreamy idealist who wishes that everyone could be Krishna or Radha and live in perfect harmony.

In addition to the many atmospheric shots of Indian life, both ritual and practical, on and along the river, there are three scenes in the film that stand out for me and resonate long after the film is over. All of them relate to and reinforce the principal theme of embracing the wonder of ever-changing life – swimming in the river.

1. [2nd section] Harriet’s eight-minute visualized story that she tells to Captain John and Valerie. An imagined young girl resists her father’s arranged-marriage demands, but on the wedding day, the chosen groom magically turns into the god Krishna – and she, herself, becomes his consort, Radha. Afterwards the married couple resume their identities and live a happily married life.
2. [3rd section] Harriet, Valerie, and Melanie are in the forested garden of the estate in section three, looking for Captain John. This is also an eight-minute sequence, and it interweaves the perspective and frustrated yearnings of all those characters.
3. [4th section] Mr. John’s brief soliloquy after Bogey’s death on the beauty and wonders of childhood. It is children, he says, who really engage the world the way it should be engaged. They see the wondrous nature that has become faint and less visible to us adults, and he celebrates the vivid, authentic life that Bogey had led.

As with most Renoir films, the ending of The River is not conclusive. The main characters do not get what they wanted, but they do emerge from the story chastened, wiser, more humane, and more mindful of how they can act cooperatively in the endless river of life. Rumer Godden's lyric closes the film:

The river runs.
The round world spins.
Dawn and lamplight,
Midnight, noon.
Sun follows day –
Night, stars, and moon.
The day ends;
The end begins.

★★★

Notes:

1. Radha Burnier was an associate of Jiddu Krishnamurti and had a long career as a leader, organizer, and author in the Theosophical Society Adyar (the original Theosophical Society). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Burnier.

“The Southerner” - Jean Renoir (1945)

Despite the brilliant artistic success of Jean Renoir’s films of the late 1930s, including La Grande Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), and The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, 1939), unforeseen events at that time conspired to derail his momentum. The Rules of the Game was a financial disaster, and the advent of World War II led to Renoir’s migration to the United States in 1941, where he began directing films in Hollywood. There he had to adapt his style to the commercial studio production system of Hollywood, which did not exactly mesh well with Renoir’s improvisational manner of filmmaking and his multi-layered, humanistic aesthetics. His third feature film in Hollywood, The Southerner (1945), was perhaps his best work during this period in America, and it earned Renoir an Oscar nomination for Best Director.

The story of The Southerner follows the course of a year in the life of a married couple, Sam and Nona Tucker, working in the southern US (Texan) cotton fields. Initially Sam and Nona are working as farmhands on a large farm enterprise, but after Sam’s uncle dies of a stroke, he decides to follow his uncle’s last words and try his luck at running his own farm. The story follows Sam’s fortunes as he sets out on his course as an independent operator. The plot offers a curious mixture of conventional Hollywood techniques and Renoir’s personal touches. For one thing, it follows more or less the classic Hollywood “mythic” narrative structure [1]:

1. Call to action
2. Encounter with allies and opponents
3. First crisis
4. Second crisis
5. Calm and false sense of security
6. Final crisis
7. Final resolution

In the case here, things start out with Sam leasing some land that noone else wants, and he then faces the problem of clearing it, planting it, and attending to his family – a wife, two children, and an unbearably querulous grandmother.

Upon acquiring the land, Sam learns that the water well on his land is ruined, and he will have to seek water from the unfriendly neighboring farmer, Devers, who turns out to be so churlish and close-fisted that we know he will be a future enemy. Then when winter comes and before Sam has made any returns, he has to try and support his family by hunting and trapping in the semi-barren brush. And then after a winter of eating only meat, his young son comes down with a life-threatening case of pellagra, the necessary treatment of which requires a sufficient diet of milk and vegetables. Again Sam approaches Devers, this time for milk, but is scornfully turned away. This crisis is overcome, though, not by overcoming Devers, but by a providential gift: a local merchant, Harmie, who has been courting Sam’s widowed mother, provides a milk cow for the Tucker family.

With Sam and Nona hard at work doing the spring planting, things seem to going well, but the jealous Devers spitefully sabotages the Tucker’s vegetable garden in order to set his neighbors back. With his fists and a little cunning Sam manages to overcome this problem, too, and with a good cotton crop coming in and his mother’s raucous wedding to Harmie taking place, everything finally seems to be joyous. But just then the storm clouds literally appear (signaling the “final crisis”), and a torrential downpour ruinously devastates Sam’s farm and farmhouse. Sam surveys the havoc after all his hard work and is finally ready to throw in the towel and give up. He has finally been defeated. But his humanist instincts prevail when he sees the family cow about to drown in the flood created by the downpour, and he rushes out to rescue it. When he returns home, he sees that Nona is industriously trying to patch things up at the homestead. Sam’s defeatism is turned around by this vision of enthusiastic support, which is the film’s high point, and the story closes on a note of optimism as the Tuckers resolve to continue their venture with their usual optimistic spirits.

Overall, the coupling of Renoir’s mise-en-scene and Hollywood’s theatrics work out well, but not everywhere. The background music by Werner Janssen, which I suppose was quite in keeping with the conventions of the time, is obnoxiously intrusive and noisy when encountered today. One feels that it would be better if that ghetto-blaster-of-a-soundtrack could be eliminated entirely (incredibly, this clamorous musical score actually received an Oscar nomination in 1945). In addition there are some awkward character stereotypes that interfere with the generally humanistic themes of the story. The character of Granny Tucker, played by Beulah Bondi, is cartoonishly grumpy and annoyingly over-the-top. Presumably she has been installed in the story for comic relief, but she hogs the screen with her rancorous pouting and is just too much of a distraction. Another cardboard character that is exaggerated to histrionics is Devers’ nephew and stooge, Finlay, played by Norman Lloyd. More successful in the comic-relief category, on the other hand, is Percy Kilbride, as the merchant Harmie. He fits in rather smoothly in the background, more in the manner of Renoir’s character actors in his earlier French classics, such as Grand Illusion.

On the upside, it must be said that the performance of J. Carrol Naish, as the mean-spirited neighbor Devers, has a rustic, hard-bitten grit that comes across as earthy and realistic. In just a few strokes, he paints a picture of the unsentimental rural society in which Sam Tucker must operate. Even better are the performances of the two leads, Zachary Scott, as Sam, and Betty Fields, as Nona. Scott was coming off his showy debut performance as the sinister villain in one of the all-time great films noir, The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). Here his native East Texan accent and style made him the perfect choice to play the earnest sharecropper, Sam Tucker. When The Southerner was released there were complaints that the European Renoir didn’t understand the nuances of the American South and that the film was unrealistic. These criticisms were besides the point, because the film was not intended for hard-core realism, and there were larger themes at issue. Nevertheless, Scott’s Texan drawl and emphatic gestures supply a generally convincing tone to the film. Fields’s performance was just as important. An accomplished stage actress who frequently appeared on Broadway, Fields gives the conjugal relationship between Nona and Sam the critical vitality that sustains the overall narrative.

The mise-en-scene and camera work does not have the intricate tracking shots that stand out in Renoir’s late-1930s French films, but there are some effective sequences nonetheless. On this occasion Renoir fashions a film featuring considerable atmospheric outdoor landscape footage that contributes to the film’s principal theme of reverence for the land.

• With his in-depth and well-composed linear tracking shots of the plowing and planting, Renoir effectively evokes the importance of the soil and the earth to the farmers.
• Sam’s dogged hunt for the possum in the winter is evocatively filmed, and it makes very effective use of edited shot separation to convey what would have been difficult to encompass into unified camera shots.
• Both the rainstorm sequence and the subsequent desperate search by Sam and his cousin for the family cow through the flooded landscape evoke the degree to which the farmers are always prey to the unpredictable forces of nature.

Besides the story following the particular fate of the Tucker family, there are larger themes considered in the film. Renoir, with his European leftist background, would be expected to show sympathy for the plight of the working class, although in this story Sam Tucker’s quest is actually entrepreneurial: he seeks to be his own boss and achieve some financial success. Nevertheless the film celebrates the rewards that come from working with “your own two hands”. In this connection Sam has a brief philosophical discussion with his cousin about the relative merits and experiences of working in the respective agricultural and industrial economies. On top of all this, of course, there is Renoir’s characteristically nuanced humanism. Everyone in the film is relatively sympathetically viewed and part of a bigger picture: they are all subject to the storms of fate, but they share a common brotherhood in the end.

Looking at both the action and relationship threads of the narrative, it becomes evident that the relationship thread is what really makes the film. This is the focus and what the film is all about. Renoir adapted a written story taken from a contemporary novel and fashioned it into a moving love story that is told visually and beyond what words can express. And the telling has a continental European flavor, too. Throughout the story, Sam’s love for his family underlies his struggles to support his family and comfort his wife in times of stress, such as when their boy is ill with “spring sickness” (pellagra). At the same time and despite their hardscrabble existence on the farm, there are numerous indicators and allusions to the fact that the couple has a tender and sensually romantic love life. But it is Sam’s even-tempered, but unwavering, determination and hard work that sustains them all through most of the story. Then in the end, when he has finally been crushed by the bad luck of a natural disaster, it is his wife, Nona, who gives him the spiritedly loving look that brightens and restores him. That lights him up inside. When you see her cheerful gaze upon Sam’s return to the house, you will be moved by the power of human love. This is Nona’s gift to Sam, and it is Renoir’s gift to the viewers. Don’t miss it.
★★★

Notes:

1. See for example:

• The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, 2nd Edition (1998), by Christopher Vogler, Michael Wiese Production.
• Save the Cat! (2005), by Blake Snyder, Michael Wiese Productons,
• Scriptwriting Updated (2001), by Linda Aronson, Allen & Unwin Publishers.
• The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver (1998), by Syd Field, Bantam-Doubleday-Dell Publishing.

"The Rules of the Game" - Jean Renoir (1939)

Arguably the greatest film ever made, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, 1939) seems at first appearances to be conventional, and yet it stands in a class of its own. One possible measure of its greatness would be to canvass all critics who have actually seen the film and ask them if they would rate it among the top five films ever made. I don’t think any other film would achieve as high a percentage of all-time top-five ratings as Renoir’s classic. And yet many appreciative critics struggle to articulate convincingly just what makes it such an outstanding work.

The story of the film concerns a weekend gathering of wealthy French socialites at a country estate. The focus is on various romantic flirtations and infidelities, involving servants and gentry alike, and as such and with its allusions to Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, it has all the external trappings of a light comedy of manners. Somehow, though, Renoir managed to mold this seemingly conventional material into a multi-layered and profound commentary on the nature of love, society, and the human condition. In the background, of course, was the generally shared feeling of impending catastrophe and social breakdown that would accompany another devastating world war. Perhaps it was not surprising in this connection that the ominous and gloomy light that the film cast on French society was not lost on its initial audience, who greeted the film with jeers and boos at its first screening. Within a year the French Vichy government had banned the film, and during the war the original film negative was destroyed, and the original director’s cut was permanently lost. The version of The Rules of the Game that exists today is the result of a painstaking reconstruction from some existing, cut-down production prints some twenty years later, and it is not precisely what Renoir originally released. Even so, when we see the film now, its lasting virtues shine through and transcend the war – and it is just as relevant today as it was in 1939.

There are eight principal characters whose interlocking romantic liaisons command the viewer’s attention:

• Robert de la Chesnaye, the owner of La Coliniere country estate
• Christine de la Chesnaye, the wife of Robert
• Genevieve de Marras, the mistress of Robert
• Lisette, the personal maid of Christine
• Edouard Schumacher, the estate gamekeeper and husband of Lisette
• Andre Jurieux, a heroic aviator
• Octave, a childhood friend of Christine
• Marceau, a poacher

The lustful associations are complex. Robert is romantically involved with his mistress, Genevieve, and his wife, Christine, who in turn is the object of the amorous intentions of Robert, Andrew, and Octave. Lisette is desired by Marceau, Octave, and her husband, Schumacher. In addition, Andre is loved by a less important character, Christine’s niece, Jackie. All of these various liaisons and flirtations go on in parallel over the course of a weekend gathering at La Coliniere. Because of the concurrent nature of the evolving relationships and the fact that the focalization is spread out over so many characters, the plot structure is fluid, with no real clear-cut boundaries. Nevertheless, one could schematically partition it into the following sections:

1. The Hero Arrives (21 minutes). Andre Jurieux is seen heroically landing his plane in Paris after a solo, transatlantic flight in record time. When interviewed by a breathless radio reporter at the scene, though, Andre petulantly expresses disappointment that his unnamed beloved (Christine) is not present to greet him. His friend Octave is there, though, and he scolds Andre for not playing the proper role of a national hero. The scene switches to the Parisian residence of the de la Chesnayes, where other characters are introduced. In a phone conversation, Robert tells Genevieve that he wishes to break off their illicit affair in order to achieve honesty in his marriage. Octave, an old friend of both Andre and Christine, seeks to cool Andre’s unrequited ardor and convert it into “friendship” by having the hero invited to a weekend hunting party at La Coliniere, the de la Chesnaye country estate.
2. The Chateau at La Coliniere (23 minutes). As various guests arrive, the estate gamekeeper, Schumacher, is instructed by Robert to reduce the rabbit population on the grounds without using fences. Making his subsequent rounds on the estate, Schumacher catches in the act a local poacher, Marceau. But Marceau’s rabbit-trapping skills appeal to Robert, who hires him to work in the chateau. As soon as Marceau arrives at the main house for work, though, he begins boldly flirting with Schumacher’s wife, Lisette.
3. The Hunt (for Animal Prey) (12 minutes). In a stark scene the wealthy guests, including women, are equipped with rifles and array themselves in blinds on the grounds, while the servant beaters drive “game” fowl into the air so that they can be shot. The guests blast away with their guns at anything that moves, with Robert shooting mostly at rabbits (not considered “game” by the hunters) in order to help rid his estate of the pest. This entire scene, which highlights the nonsensical slaughter of sentient beings for "sport", is a metaphor for the unreflective way we let our lives be governed by conventional rules that compromise our humanity. Later on in the film when one of the main characters is tragically killed, Marceau remarks, “He didn’t suffer. He dropped like an animal in the hunt.” At the close of the hunt, Robert meets Genevieve in a remote location and politely terminates their liaison. But Christine happens to spy their farewell embrace through viewing glasses and now first learns of her husband’s affair, which she thinks is still aflame.
4. Human Prey at the Chateau (28 minutes). After the hunt, the guests socialize and put on their own costumed music-hall entertainment, while at the same time there are parallel trysts and flirtatious encounters (all ill-fated) involving (a) Christine and one of the guests, St. Aubin, jealously watched by Andre, (b) Robert and Genevieve, and (c) Lisette and Marceau, jealously stalked by Schumacher. Things only get worse, as misunderstandings, angry confrontations, and Schumacher’s jealous attempts to gun down Marceau bring the entire party to pandemonium. This justly-acclaimed sequence is a masterful, almost delirious, display of deep-focus mise-en-scène – the pinnacle of Renoir’s career.
5. The Unraveling (23 minutes). With order seemingly restored and Schumacher and Marceau dismissed from service, Christine and Octave retire to a greenhouse to talk things over. Their philosophical discussion about human nature and love is both a reflective commentary and an intimation of deeper affection. But a final, tragic misunderstanding puts a rueful end to their hopes and to the story, as well.

Certainly The Rules of the Game is more than an upstairs-downstairs comedy of manners. But many critics see the film primarily as a castigation of the outmoded European upper-class values and social irresponsibility in the face of impending war. To me the film has grander and more profound themes that relate to the fundamentals of social interaction. In fact on repeated viewings, one finds new elements and nuances on which to reflect.

Social class and the rules. On the general subject of social class, there are interesting phenomena on display that relate more generally to how society operates. For people of any stripe, there are the “rules of the game”, the norms and policies that specify proper behaviour. But the game rules apply differently, depending on social class. For the upper-class people, the rules can easily be bent according to circumstances and convenience. For example Robert, Genevieve, and St. Aubin, who all belong to the privileged class, are quite willing to engage in illicit affairs. For them such pecadillos are merely minor transgressions that can be overlooked in the larger scheme of things. But for the lower classes, the rules set up serious behavioral boundaries. For example, Schumacher knows that his boss, Robert, wants to rid the estate of rabbits, but he still cannot tolerate the poacher Marceau’s rule violation. But for Robert, Marceau’s rabbit poaching seems downright beneficial, and the usual prohibition against poaching can be set aside in his case. Similarly, among the upper-class set at La Coliniere, individual social outliers are tolerated if they sport the wealth and/or proper manner appropriate to the set. Thus, both Robert, who has Jewish ancestry, and one of the guests who is conspicuously homosexual, are accepted as belonging to the upper class in-group, something not so easily attainable at the lower social rungs.

It is interesting that Andre, Christine, and Octave all stand somewhat outside the circle of upperclass society.

• Andre is a temporary member by virtue of his role as the national hero. But heros are expected to stand outside ordinary social contexts and represent idealized virtues. This is why they can gain universal acclaim, but the demands of this role are almost impossible to meet in practice for very long.
• Christine is the aristocrat imported from Austria, an outsider who struggles to adjust to the customs of the French gentry.
• Octave (played by Renoir, himself) is simply the tolerated friend of the aristocrats – the would-be artist who sees it all from the outside and can only express frustration at his inability to reconcile everyone’s (including his own) romantic dreams with reality.

Among the lower classes there are gradations, too. Schumacher, who tends to the grounds outside the main house, stands at a lower social position than the servants in the house, who work more closely with the gentry. Marceau, the poacher, is outside and below this social scheme altogether. Accordingly Schumacher follows the rules rigidly, while Marceau has no moral inhibitions whatsoever (he has nothing to lose), which unequally tilts their amorous face-off over Lisette from the outset. As for Lisette, she clings to her social status as Christine’s personal maid more fervently than she does to any other personal relationship.

Communication and Context. On a deeper level The Rules of the Game examines the ever-growing difficulty associated with the overlapping rules of social behaviour. Highlighted here is the fact that every human exchange necessarily has its own specific interactive context, and these contexts cannot be universally shared. Nor can these contexts be neatly isolated. Life was so much simpler in the past when social classes were more isolated and there was less intermingling of contexts. As the guests and servants intermingle in The Rules of the Game, they must continually shift gears and play according to the different rules. Everything would work nicely if there were a universal set of rules that could apply everywhere, but Renoir is reminding us that such a dream is impossible. Robert de la Chesnaye implicitly has that unattainable dream, though – he has devoted his life to collecting mechanical devices in which automated dolls act according to mechanical instructions. If only all of life could be mechanized according to some such set of rules, everything would work out perfectly and without awkward mistakes, just as Robert’s mechanical figures do when they are operated. In such an orderly, mechanically-driven world, Robert wouldn’t find himself in the position of necessarily having to disappoint someone (either Genevieve or Christine) – there would be a provable solution to every social problem. But of course it didn’t work that way in 1939, and in today’s ever more intermingled society, the situation gets only worse. (If his character role were to be translated to today’s setting, Robert would probably be obsessed with automated computer technology.) Robert’s interest in mechanical toys reflects his underlying “Objectivist” stance (see the discussion of Objectivism in my review of Michael Moore’s SiCKO). The reductionist world-view of the Objectivist is widely held in modern society, but it usually doesn’t work very well in connection with human interactions. In human social situations, context cannot be abstracted away as it often can in the physical sciences – there are too many details and too much complexity that cannot be covered by the rules of interaction. But today we often pretend that we can do the impossible: live according to simple social rules. To carry on this pretense, we inevitably have to lie (we even sometimes wind up fooling ourselves). When in the film the idealistic romantic, Christine, complains (after learning about her husband’s infidelity) that for three years her life had been based on lies, Octave points out to her that today everyone lies, including the government, the pharmaceuticals, and the media, so it should be OK for simple people like themselves to do it, too. We must ultimately acknowledge that social rules of a mechanical nature can only offer skeletal guidelines for behaviour. Rather than invariably seeing deviations from these rules as violations, these rules and their enforcement must sometimes be moderated by higher-level values of love and tolerance.

Love and Brotherhood. Interestingly, many of the characters do indeed come together at various times in the story and share a kind of mutual, humanistic bonding that transcends the specific social game-playing in which they are momentarily involved. This humanistic bonding suggests something more universal and crosses the boundaries of class. The following is a list of the “brotherly” or “sisterly” interactions that take place in this manner during the film:

• Robert ↔ Andre
• Robert ↔ Octave
• Robert ↔ Marceau
• Marceau ↔ Schumacher
• Marceau ↔ Octave
• Octave ↔ Andre
• Octave ↔ Christine
• Christine ↔ Genevieve
• Christine ↔ Lisette

In each case the two interlocutors share a certain amount of candor and honesty, during which time they let their guards down and are relatively comfortable with each other as equals. Robert attempts to achieve such an encounter with Genevieve, but she will have none of it; Genevieve longs for something higher and even more universal.

What Genevieve would like (but knows she cannot realistically get) is something that Andre, Christine, and even Octave, all passionately desire: romantic love. Romantic love is universal, infinite, ego-dissolving, and in its ideal it transcends all contexts and boundaries. To be a lover is to live a dream, to play an idealized role in a dreamscape that is almost impossible to sustain for long. In the last analysis, neither Andre nor Octave can fulfill the extreme demands of romantic love, and they succumb to concerns for the social rules that govern their ordinary lives. This is the lament that Renoir plays out for us in The Rules of the Game.

Renoir’s achievement. Renoir managed to do justice to all these issues under discussion by cinematicly painting them in richer, more subtle shades than one sees in most films. The resulting effect is dazzling. The cinematography is extraordinary, with multiple, meaningful actions taking place in depth, using deep-focus photography. In the rapturous Act 4 ("Human Prey at the Chateau”), there is a breathtaking sequence of multiple 30-to-45-second shots in which many of the characters come in and out of the picture, seemingly at random, to interact in complex ways. In this sequence, the multiple romantic threads crisscross in the chateau corridors, and yet they appear more or less naturally, with a minimum of editorial cuts. Throughout these shots, Renoir maintains fluid camera movements and temporary compositions that maintain a visual balance, matched only perhaps by Mizoguchi. At the same time, the actors remain in-character and sustain their distinct personas. All of the acting is physically and visually expansive, yet effective, with memorable performances from veterans of his past works, including Julien Carette (as Marceau), Gaston Modot (as Schumacher), and Marcel Dalio (as Robert de la Chesnaye). Nora Gregor played the role of the semi-outsider, Christine, who in the story is said to have arrived years earlier from Austria, which matched her real-life circumstances -- she was, herself, a recent refugee actress who had fled Austria as a result of the Nazi Germany depredations.

It is reported that Renoir had completed less than half the shooting script when filming began, so that he must have made up a good part of the shooting scenario in a relatively extemporaneous fashion. It is hard to believe that such carefully blocked-out shots, with such fully-fleshed-out and nuanced acting, could have been accomplished in a supposedly impromptu fashion. You really must watch carefully this section of The Rules of the Game to appreciate just why the film is held in such high esteem and why it has had such a mesmerizing effect on directors that followed. For one example (there are several) of this virtuosity keep an eye out for the 43-second shot scanning the audience during the costumed performance in the darkened little theater that features Andre jealously watching St. Aubin and Christine, while Schumacher jealously searches for Lisette and Marceau. Alain Resnais said that he was stunned when he first saw the film. Robert Altman said that the film taught him the “rules of the game” of filmmaking, and indeed it led him to emulate Renoir’s multi-character, multi-layered narrative style in his own films.

The Rules of the Game was Renoir’s career high point, coming directly after two other outstanding films of his that were stylistically and thematically somewhat different: La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938). Soon the world war would overwhelm Europe, and Renoir would flee to the United States, remote from his built-up ensemble of artistic collaborators. Through the various vicissitudes that would follow in his travels, however, he would always retain his unique inclusive perspective on the human condition.
★★★★

"La Bête Humaine" - Jean Renoir (1938)

In the late 1930s Jean Renoir was at the peak of his directorial career, turning out a string of film destined to be classics, including Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937), La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast, 1938), and La Règle du Jeu, (The Rules of the Game, 1939). La Bête Humaine, based on Émile Zola’s well-known 1890 novel, offered a mixture of styles that combined his characteristic humanism with a more fatalistic vision of people unable to overcome the dark forces controlling not only their destinies, but their very own actions, as well.

Zola’s La Bête Humaine was part of his Les Rougon-Macquart cycle of interlinked novels tracing the fortunes of several families over a number of generations. These “naturalistic” stories focused on the deleterious effects of overweening greed that he felt dominated the late 19th century industrial age. In addition he also seemed to have had questionable theories concerning the hereditary influence that ravenous appetites, such as indulgence in alcoholism and violence, had on the offspring of such greedy parents. Presumably out of respect for Zola’s original work, Renoir’s film does refer to this unsound theory when he has Lantier say that he felt he was “paying for all those grandfathers and fathers who drank – all those generations of drunkards who poisoned my blood”. But Renoir’s focus in his own version of La Bête Humaine was more personal and existential than Zola’s broader, and supposedly more “objective”, social commentary, and this was definitely a felicitous path to follow.

The story revolves around the activities of the following principal characters:

• Jacques Lantier (played by Jean Gabin), a railroad engineer on the Paris to Le Havre run.
• Pecqueux, Lantier’s close workmate and the stoker (French: “chauffeur”) on that train run.
• Monsieur Roubaud, the local station master at Le Havre.
• Séverine (played by Simone Simon), Roubaud’s wife

Renoir presented the story of Zola’s lengthy and involved novel of more than four hundred pages by organizing it into essentially four sections or “acts”.

1. Introduction of the Principal Characters (23 minutes).

The film opens, memorably, with a justly famous sequence of the steam engine speeding on the rails towards Le Havre. For about seven minutes the film shows the train from the perspective of the two operators, Lantier and Pecqueux, as they communicate by hand signals due to the noise of the roaring engine. This was an amazing feat of cinematography for the time, because it included some tracking shots inside the engine cab carried out while it was moving at speed. Renoir also had a cameraman sitting on the cowcatcher of the train in order to shoot head-on point-of-view shots as the train moved across railroad bridges and through tunnels, all a high speed. The impression one gets from this scene is that of the overwhelming power and speed of the train, and, by implication, the pace of “modern” life, which is beyond the means of the people who are trying to maintain it properly on its course.

When the train enters and stops in the Le Havre train station, Lantier discovers that the engine needs repairs, and he and Pecqueux are told to cool their heels in the area for two days. We are also introduced to Roubaud, the local station master, who dotes on his pretty and much younger wife, Séverine. After an argument with a wealthy and prickly passenger, Roubaud presses his wife to come with him to Paris and get Grandmorin, her godfather and a director of the railroad company, to protect his job.

Meanwhile with some time on his hands, Lantier goes to the nearby village of Breaute-Beuzeville to visit his aunt. Her daughter, his cousin Flore, he finds has grown up to be an attractive woman.  But while in the act of embracing her in a local field, he has a fit and almost strangles her, before a passing train snaps him out of his manic trance. Afterwards he confesses to her that this temporary madness is his permanent medical condition that he does not know how to overcome.

These opening scenes provide the basic character development of the principal roles. Roubaud is a proud individual, concerned with how others see him. His pretty wife, Séverine, is gentle, but a bit of a coquette. Lantier and Pecqueux are good, solid, working-class, individuals, but Lantier suffers from a mysterious temporary form of madness.

2. Roubaud and Séverine (31 minutes).

Roubaud and Séverine visit Paris, where Séverine visits Grandmorin and accomplishes her mission. However the emotionally insecure Roubaud becomes jealous about Grandmorin, and when he abusively questions his wife, he learns that she was once Grandmorin’s mistress. Furious, he forces Séverine to join him in a plot to kill Grandmorin on the train back to Le Havre. They accomplish the murder, but they are observed by Lantier, who was also on the train, returning from Breaute-Beuzeville.. When the police investigate the murder and interview all the passengers, however, Lantier withholds testifying against Roubaud and Séverine. The police magistrate falsely accuses someone else, the lower-class poacher Cabuche (played by Jean Renoir, himself). Nevertheless Séverine is suspicious that he might spill the beans, and she resolves to make friends with him. At the same time she informs her husband that the murder has made him repulsive to her and that she doesn’t want him to touch her any more.

3. The Affair with Séverine (22 minutes).

Lantier grows amorous towards Séverine, but she tells him that she only wants to be his friend, not his lover. Meanwhile, Roubaud, ignored by his wife, has become gloomy and aimless, and he spends more and more of his time gambling and losing money. One rainy night, while Roubaud is out gambling, Lantier arranges to see Séverine, and their mutual passion finally flares up and is unleashed. They make love in an empty rail-yard toolshed. Then they make plans to ambush Roubaud in the dark and kill him, but in the event at the critical moment, Lantier loses his nerve. At this point Roubaud, who had been a pole of focalization up to this point, pretty much vanishes from the story, and his murder of Grandmorin is never resolved by the police.

4. Meeting at the Dance Hall (25 minutes).

Now Séverine keeps her distance from Lantier. He makes another train run to Paris and back, and he sees her at a dance hall, now carousing with another man. When he confronts her, she tells him that it’s all over between them, because he cannot do what must be done to make her happy. He goes back to her place and promises that this time he will not lose his nerve and will carry out the murder of Roubaud for sure. She is finally convinced and agrees to run away with him if he does it. But when they mistakenly hear a noise that Roubaud might be approaching, Lantier has another one of his seizures and brutally kills Séverine, instead. In a stupor he returns to the railroad yard and gets on the train out of Le Havre. While the train is rolling at high speed, he blankly confesses to Pecqueux that he has just committed murder. Then he seems to have another seizure, attacks Pecqueux, and then jumps from the speeding train to his death.

With a plot structure like that, one can only marvel at how Renoir made an interesting film out of it. Many of the actions in the story, at least as presented on film, lack convincing motivation. Not only is Lantier’s violence mindless, but Roubaud’s jealous psyche is bizarre: he first obsessively murders Grandmorin and then later seems unaccountably indifferent to Séverine’s infidelity with Lantier. All three principal characters, Lantier, Séverine, and Roubaud, are driven by some unexplained inner compulsions to do things that can only make themselves and others around them miserable. Lantier, of course, is the most obvious case, since his fits of madness are directed at targets most precious to him: Flore, Séverine, and finally, his own life. Roubaud is also self-destructive, although on a smaller scale. And Séverine, who despite always seeming to have a smile on her face, actually sees herself as a miserable, tormented woman who must find a way to free herself. One might be tempted to view these three characters as simply odd, disturbed individuals – outliers who don’t deserve our sympathy. And yet Renoir manages to evoke out compassion for all three of them. Even Roubaud seems, for the most part, to be a pathetic individual. By humanizing them, there is an implicit suggestion that all of us have a “beast” lurking inside of ourselves, just as much as we may also have an inner “Buddha”, as well.

A word must be said in this respect about the acting of Jean Gabin, as Lantier, and Simone Simon as Séverine. At this time Gabin was at the height of his career and was the star of a string of movies by Marcel Carné, Julian Duvivier, and Renoir during these years. In all cases he embodied the ideal image that Frenchmen had of the common man – that of a sturdy, honest man of natural integrity. This was the French period of the National Front, with its liberal ideals of uniting all classes under a common banner. Gabin had the straightforward style that appealed to both women and men during this period. Simone Simon, who would later go to the United States and appear in Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944), was not quite such a stellar figure at the box office, but she is absolutely magnetic here in La Bête Humaine. She manifests the innate qualities of a truly seductive femme fatale: she projects the innocence of a person that is so natural and compelling, probably even to herself, that one fails to see the underlying destructive selfishness.

Renoir captures the mood and feelings of the relationship between Lantier and Séverine, especially during their tryst on the rainy night, with artful studio lighting that emphasizes the almost secret emotional sanctuary that their relationship confers on them. Such scenes contrast with the raw, brute nature of the railroad trains that symbolize the uncontrollable forces that dominate their lives. Renoir bridges this contrast by his unique mise-en-scène, which shifts smoothly between intimate closeups and camera shots from a distance. Some critics site Renoir’s penchant for “framing” his shots through door and window frames, but I think this is more a matter of maintaining the camera at a certain distance, perforce physically locating it outside the room. This both distances the viewer somewhat from the scene and also situates the characters in the environment or landscape. Thus he often shows individuals in extreme long shot, dwarfed by their natural surroundings. The resulting effect is to ground the destinies of his players in the greater context that is largely outside their control.

The period of the late 1930s was one of growing pessimism in Europe, when Spain was falling apart and Nazi Germany’s bellicosity was increasingly ominous. An air of fatalism was starting to take hold on the European mind. The gloomy atmosphere in Europe has led social commentators to identify La Bête Humaine with Carné’s “Poetic Realism” films, Le Quai des Brumes (1938) and Le Jour se Léve (1939), although there are some stylistic differences between Renoir and Carné. Renoir’s focus covers a broader spectrum of characters who are grounded in a particular situation and circumstances. Carné, on the other hand, tends to focus more closely on a single characters, whose environmental situation is more distant and abstract.

Renoir and Carné have also both been identified with a narrative style that was later to be called film noir. To be sure, it is hard to find a more seductive femme fatale, a signal feature of film noir, than Séverine in La Bête Humaine. But since Lantier’s violent actions are so unmotivated and contradictory to his own desires, La Bête Humaine has a kind of philosophical despair to it that puts it on a different level from the romantic/existential despair of Le Jour se Léve. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the negative side, we have to admit that Lantier’s sporadic insanity has a distancing effect on the viewer, because his violence is so thoroughly unmotivated. On the positive side, though, this distancing supports Renoir’s stepping back and surrounding Lantier in the larger context and more uplifting milieu of working-class camaraderie and solidarity, embodied by the loyalty of his friend, Pecqueux (played to perfection by Julien Carette). At the end of the film, Renoir altered Zola’s catastrophic ending (in which an on-train fistfight between Lantier and Pecqueux led to them falling to their deaths, thereby dooming the train full of passengers) and closed with Pecqueux and the other train workers returning to work.
★★★½