Well, I'll be damned – it seems that the French did invent film noir, after all! In Jean Renoir's 'The Human Beast (1938),' the noir mould, thematically if not stylistically, is virtually complete. When a husband and wife (Fernand Ledoux and Simone Simon) murder the wife's wealthy lover, one witness – Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), a mentally-unstable railway driver – threatens to expose their secret. To protect herself, the wife quickly seduces Lantier, and attempts to maneuver him into murdering her abusive and controlling husband. The following year, Renoir produced 'The Rules of the Game (1939)' as a "pleasant" film about a society that he believed had become rotten. There's no such pleasantness to be found in 'The Human Beast,' in which even the prettiest, most innocent-looking woman is capable of evil (in an introduction recorded in 1967, Renoir remarks that he chose Simone Simon for the role precisely because she seemed perfectly innocuous).
Simone Simon, gracefully seductive in her natural tongue (as opposed to her stunted English in 'Cat People (1942)'), is a classic femme fatale. Jean Gabin's performance is also good, though his character is afflicted with an unlikely psychological condition: for no sensible reason, Lantier occasionally feels the need to throttle the women in his life, a psychosis that is so poorly explored (beyond vague allusions to a family history of alcoholism) that it serves merely as a clumsy plot device. Throughout the film, Lantier spends large amounts of time with his locomotive "La Lison," which is lovingly photographed in action during a wordless opening sequence. Renoir intended the train to be interpreted as a third party in a twisted love triangle also involving Lantier and Séverine. However, I never really got the sense that the train was a major, animate character; perhaps this was more clearly established in Émile Zola's 1890 novel.
Simone Simon, gracefully seductive in her natural tongue (as opposed to her stunted English in 'Cat People (1942)'), is a classic femme fatale. Jean Gabin's performance is also good, though his character is afflicted with an unlikely psychological condition: for no sensible reason, Lantier occasionally feels the need to throttle the women in his life, a psychosis that is so poorly explored (beyond vague allusions to a family history of alcoholism) that it serves merely as a clumsy plot device. Throughout the film, Lantier spends large amounts of time with his locomotive "La Lison," which is lovingly photographed in action during a wordless opening sequence. Renoir intended the train to be interpreted as a third party in a twisted love triangle also involving Lantier and Séverine. However, I never really got the sense that the train was a major, animate character; perhaps this was more clearly established in Émile Zola's 1890 novel.