The Human Beast (1938)

La Bête Humaine (English: The Human Beast and Judas Was a Woman) is a 1938 French film directed by Jean Renoir, with cinematography by Curt Courant. The picture features Jean Gabin and Simone Simon, and is loosely based on the novel La Bête humaine by Émile Zola.

The Human Beast [Emile Zola, Louis Coleman] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This is a complete and faithful translation of Zola's master novel La Bete Humaine, his fastest moving and best organized work.

Directed by Jean Renoir. With Jean Gabin, Julien Carette, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux. In this classic adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, a tortured train engineer falls in love with a troubled married woman who has helped her husband commit a murder.

Other articles where The Human Beast is discussed: Émile Zola: Les Rougon-Macquart: In La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast) he analyzes the hereditary urge to kill that haunts the Lantier branch of the family, set against the background of the French railway system, with its powerful machinery and rapid movement. La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle) traces both the defeat of the…

Other articles where The Human Beast is discussed: Jean Renoir: Early years: …war; La Bête humaine (1938; The Human Beast, or Judas Was a Woman), an admirable free interpretation of Zola; and especially La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game), his masterpiece. Cut and fragmented by the distributors, this classic film was also regarded as a failure until it…

Based on a novel by Emile Zola, La Bete Humaine weaves a mesmerizing tale of a tragic triangle. Train engineer Jean Gabin lusts after Simone Simon, the wife of his co-worker Fernand Ledoux. When Ledoux is in danger of losing his job, Simon offers herself to her husband's boss. In jealous pique, Ledoux kills the man. Gabin is witness to this, so Simon promises to reward him sexually if he'll keep quiet. As this romance intensifies, Simon tries to finagle Gabin into killing Ledoux. Sick of the whole sordid affair, Gabin murders Simon and then kills himself. When Fritz Lang remade La Bete Humaine as Human Desire in 1953, he carefully copied several of the best visual selections made by Jean Renoir in the original film; what he was not permitted to copy was the story itself, which had to be heavily laundered to accommodate Hollywood's censorship limitations. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi