Review of La Bête Humaine (1938) by John M — 30 Oct 2007

A french renoir classic adapted from the realism mater emile zola's "the human beast"....zola's been noted for his naturalistic and experiemental descriptions of rotten audacity hidden among society in a more objectively severe method instead of vulgar sensationalism....the film version somehow de-sexualizes the original and dignified with a more moral ending as the revival of character conscience brightened by jean gabin's decent mensch image. atagonist jacques has an inherited hatred toward women, struggling to distract his focus from strangling any woman in touch with him to death that only implies a bit in the first 20 mins of the flick. and the film centers more on jacques' guilty consciousness of being descended into a married woman's connived accomplice of murderous crime and his innocent resistance to his mistress's seduction into commiting the actual ruthless murder on her decadent gambling husband. eventually he surrenders to her ingenune-alike femme fatale charisma but what fate and his corrupted blood would repel against his wish to reunite his happiness with her??

In zola's original, jacques is more of lusicous slave empowered by beguiling female allure...also a striking creature in zola's endorsed description...and the cuckolding wife is a lecherous calculated woman who seeks every chance to have affairs....they are both beast-alike and enslaves by their own greed and lust. and adulteris are permeating in the novel...jacques even sleeps with his coleague's wife to testify the syptoms of his peculiarly pathological sexual illness that leads into the catastrophe of a whole trainwreck in the end. the end is a social metaphor commenting that all these beastly scum-men and other bystanding hypocrites should purgated by blood and sentenced to the ruin as serving justice.

But renoir's movie interpretation is rather an individual tradegy, a self-destruction as redemption sort of thing than zola's strictly dissected social criticism tainted with un-forgiving cynicism.

Personally I highly recommend zola's novels...he writes those deceased society tales with bluntly sharp perspects without abusive profanity.... english or american literature usually preserve the salving mercy or moralistic lecturing in the very end, even cynicist maugham would assign some saving grace of warming female companionship for his limp protagonist as closure.