Shadow Masters

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,” Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime tells Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins in The Third Man.

Similarly, in France during the 1930s and the occupation there was the betrayal of Munich, the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, collaboration with the Germans and the murder of the French Jews. Directors working in French cinema, however, included Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir and Jean Grémillon. They made some of the greatest films of the last century—La Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows), Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak), La Grande Illusion, Les Enfants du Paradis, to name only a few. Especially distinguished is La Bête Humaine, from the Emile Zola novel and directed by Jean Renoir not long after he completed an earlier masterpiece, La Grande Illusion, in 1937.

La Bête Humaine has recently been released on DVD in the Criterion Collection. Fortunately this has not been a lost film for Australians. There was an excellent 16mm print available from the French Embassy in the seventies when I was beginning my film history courses at Mitchell CAE. Still the Criterion DVD has some impressive extras: a discussion excerpted from a French television program on adapting Zola to the screen with among others Pierre Bost, author of the screenplay for Gervaise; a thoughtful reflection on the movie by Peter Bogdanovich; and best of all, contributions from Jean Renoir himself, recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. The transfer is excellent. I imagine we are seeing the film on DVD in the same sort of crisp black-and-white visuals its first viewers saw in 1938.

Renoir’s first appearance on the DVD is an introduction filmed in 1967 for a revival of La Bête Humaine. With great panache he explains how he was approached by Jean Gabin and the producer Raymond Hakim to direct the film, and wrote a script in twelve days. “It is always good to have a script when you begin a film,” the great director says off-handedly in tones that would send chills down the collective spine of any Australian funding authority. Needless to say Renoir never intended to follow that script, and no one was going to give notes to the director of La Grande Illusion. Renoir simply developed the screenplay as he went along. If this seems a cavalier approach to one of the classics of French literature, it was because Zola belonged to the circle of his father, the painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. “Not that I ever conversed with him. I was six when he died but I remember the look—the eyeglasses and the beard,” Renoir explains in the interview. He admits he was far more intimidated adapting Flaubert for his film version of Madame Bovary—“Zola’s was a world with which I was entirely familiar.” Consequentially Renoir was much less inhibited about reshaping the original novel. According to one story, he kept the book with him during the shoot, using it as a source for new dialogue as he reworked the plot. (Renoir admitted that the dialogue he wrote in the first scenario was terrible.)

Nevertheless the adaptation is very skilful. Renoir uses only one central thread of the Zola original: the story of the engine driver Lantier and his involvement with the station master Roubaud and his wife Séverine. In a jealous rage Roubaud kills the industrialist Grandmorin because he seduced his wife when she was sixteen years old—“an old man’s leavings”. Lantier knows Roubaud is the murderer but keeps silent because he is falling in love with Séverine. But Lantier, as in the novel, is doomed to kill anyone he loves.

Renoir omits much of the original’s grotesque melodrama. The crossing guard is no longer poisoning Lantier’s Aunt Phasie for her hidden legacy, nor do Lantier and his fireman fight and fall to their deaths under the wheels of the locomotive as their train filled with drunken singing soldiers speeds driverless into the night. For Zola this symbolised France’s plunge into the Franco-Prussian War. Although in the film the action has been updated to the 1930s, Renoir included no specific references to French politics. Still the production coincided with the break-up of the Popular Front, the Anschluss and the Munich crisis.

As Renoir scholar Alexander Sesonske has observed, La Bête Humaine’s pessimistic mood and air of dark fatality reflected the time it was being made. Not that one would think that from Renoir’s introduction, where he describes with great relish how they shot the scenes on the train. He had managed to persuade French Rail to provide a real stretch of track, an engine, a flatbed on which the lighting and sound equipment was tied down, some passenger cars where the cast and crew could rest and make up, and another locomotive at the rear to get them up to speed while they staged the action in the cabin of the first engine. Jean Gabin and Julien Carrette both learned to drive a train and their interaction in the famous opening sequence as the express hurtles down the line into Le Havre tells us all we need to know about their camaraderie and professionalism.

It is Renoir’s portrayal of the lives of these ordinary railway workers that alleviates at least some of the work’s sense of despair. Unlike Zola, who finds only brutality and violence in the working class, Renoir treats ordinary Frenchmen with respect and compassion. A famous example discussed by the director on the DVD is the moment where Lantier nearly strangles his childhood sweetheart, Flore (Blanchette Brunoy), and tells her he believes he is paying the bill for others, “for fathers and grandfathers who had soaked themselves, for generations of drunkards of which he was the impure blood heritage, with slow poisoning and something savage in him”. In the novel Lantier runs away and lies on the grass after attacking Flore and the famous passage is part of an internal soliloquy and flashback recalling all the times before when he imagined killing girls to whom he was attracted. Renoir sets the scene beside the railroad tracks on a bright sunlit day, with Lantier distracted by a passing train from his murderous attack on Flore. Before the close shots where Gabin’s Lantier tells Flore that he can’t love her, there is a long shot of the two figures with a beautiful cloud formation above them. Having the lines delivered in such a setting by a man as handsome as Gabin evokes the character’s tragedy far better than if Renoir had staged the scene in the shadows of the railway yard.

Even though La Bête Humaine is arguably the first film noir, none of the characters are stereotypes. Lantier may be a compulsive killer, seen as a monster in the famous shot in the mirror after the final murder, but he is also gentle and romantic. Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), who flies into a violent rage on discovering his wife’s “infidelity”, is shown earlier as dignified and conscientious. Renoir went to great lengths to avoid making Séverine a conventional vamp. As he explains on the DVD, instead of a dark actress he chose Simone Simon, who was noted for the gentle delicacy of her playing. Under Renoir’s direction she gives an extraordinary multi-layered performance that captures the character’s ruthlessness and vulnerability—a murderess with the face of an angel.

The DVD includes an excerpt from a 1957 French television special on Renoir in which the director recreates Simon’s final scene with the still beautiful actress. Although it is clearly not entirely spontaneous—there is mention of a discussion the day before—Renoir displays all the qualities that made him such a favourite with his performers. First he sets the scene, reminds Simon of the character’s motivation, runs through the lines, cues her, then becomes the most appreciative audience she could ever wish to have; and the hauntingly beautiful performance we remember from the film happens before our eyes. “Did I get it for you?” she asks. Renoir nods then kisses her.

Alexander Sesonske’s definitive account of the film points out that La Bête Humaine is the only Renoir film that can be termed poetic realism—the despairing series of movies about the tragedies of ordinary people that dominated French cinema in the late 1930s. Two of the greatest works of the cycle, Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des Brumes (1938) and Le Jour se Lève (1939) were released almost in tandem with La Bête Humaine. There are many similarities. All share, in Luc Sant’s words, “the ragged outlines, the lowdown settings, the romantic fatalism, the movement of the story, first upward to a single moment of happiness, then down to inexorable doom”. Renoir’s cinematographer, Curt Courant, also photographed Le Jour se Lève, and Jean Gabin appears in all three.

The main difference between Renoir and his great rival is Carné’s collaboration with the production designer Alexandre Trauner. Trauner recreates the detail of working-class life. The hip bath we see in the cramped flat of Louis Jouvet’s pimp and Arletty’s whore in Hotel du Nord tells us all we need to know about their physical intimacy. But there is also stylisation—shadows and banisters placed to create the most effective symbolism, the famous fogs in Le Quai des Brumes: all help to create a dark poetry of despair.

Renoir’s settings, on the other hand, are the railway men’s communal living quarters, the train tracks and the yards. They appear to have been either filmed on the spot or reproduced in the studio, much as they were in the British documentaries of the period. Lantier and Séverine’s love-making in the hut where they take shelter from the rain, and the attempt on Roubaud’s life, both take place in the railway yards. As well, Renoir uses his locations to recreate Zola’s descriptions of the constant movement of the trains. If the poetry is not in the design it is in the way Renoir and Courant film the action in simply-framed open groupings, the emphasis on the characters and their emotions. The director liked to frame action through doorways or windows to draw the viewer’s eyes into the world of the film. In this environment the tragedy has a terrible logic that is far more powerful than the resolutions of the Carné films. But this is to make very fine discriminations and all three are great works of art.

A few years later, with many of his films banned, Carné was accused by the men of Vichy of creating the pessimism and despair that had led to the fall of France. The great director replied, “I was just the barometer.” Harry Lime was right: you don’t have to have a comfortable society to create great art.