Jean Renoir by Ronald Bergan

Author:Ronald Bergan [Bergan, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: e9781628726251
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

During the making of La Bête humaine, the script, which Jean considered fairly superficial initially, kept being reworked and brought closer, he felt, to the poetry rather than the naturalism of Zola. It was the kind of grimy poetry that appealed to Graham Greene, who wrote: ‘What is most deft is the way in which Renoir works the depot and a man’s job into every scene–conversations on platforms, in washrooms and canteens. Views from the station-master’s window over the steaming metal waste: the short, sharp lust worked out in a wooden plate-layer’s shed among the shunted trucks under the steaming rain.’9

While engine driver Jacques Lantier (Gabin) is travelling as a passenger on a train to Le Havre, he encounters the deputy station master Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux) and his young wife Séverine (Simone Simon) leaving the compartment where Roubaud, watched by his wife, has just killed Grandmorin (Jacques Berlioz), the rich man who seduced her. In response to the pleading look of Séverine, Lantier tells the police nothing, and Cabuche (Jean Renoir), a man with a criminal record, is arrested for the crime. Lantier and Séverine begin a love affair and she persuades him to murder her husband, but he cannot carry it out. A few days later, during the railwayman’s ball, Lantier goes to Séverine’s apartment and, in the midst of one of his uncontrollable fits, stabs her to death. The next morning, he commits suicide by jumping off the locomotive he is driving.

Fritz Lang, who made a Hollywood version called Human Desire in 1954, commented, ‘Naturally in an American movie, you can’t make a hero a sex killer. Impossible. Jerry Wald [Columbia boss] was very impressed with the Renoir film, in which there are a lot of trains going into tunnels, which Jerry thought was a sex symbol; I doubt Renoir in 1938 ever thought about sex symbols . . .’10

Renoir did. Much of the sexual symbolism and imagery of the novel, although toned down, remained in the film, the pulsing locomotives included. In the novel Zola writes of Lantier’s love for La Lison, his locomotive: ‘He possessed her, he rode her in his own way with absolute will, as her master, yet never relaxing his severity, treating her like a wild animal he had tamed, but whom he could never quite trust.’

The locomotive is filmed as a mechanical Beauty ridden by the human Beast, and Gabin’s eyes light up with genuine passion as he speaks of La Lison, ‘the best engine on the line.’ Elsewhere, there is a more blatant sexual symbol–while Lantier and Séverine make love in the railway shed, the camera moves to a overflowing rain barrel.

For the role of Séverine, the producers originally suggested Gina Manès, then pushing 43, who had played the title role in Thérèse Raquin (1928), Jacques Feyder’s silent Zola adaptation, and who had made a reputation in other femme fatale roles. Jean refused vehemently. ‘I claimed, and still claim, that vamps have to be played by women with innocent faces. Women

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