The Jean Renoir deeper dive is starting to heat up, as I had recently re-watched La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game. Yesterday I gave The Human Beast a second viewing (the first was a couple years ago). I remember liking it, but I definitely liked it a lot more this time. It helps that I'm bunching directors together, which allows me to get a greater sense of their approach, as compared to random one-offs. The film is a brutal psychological study, but also a definite forerunner for film noir. Jean Gabin (who is typically Jean Gabin - that is, awesome) plays the tortured railroad engineer Jacques Lantier, while Simone Simon (who, in the US anyway, is too often simply reminded of her role in the original Cat People) plays Severine Roubaud, who drives a couple men to their doom. Julien Carette (who had also appeared in La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game) plays Lantier friend, while Jean Renoir sneaks in as Cabuche, who is falsely accused of a murder. Expect to see more Renoir movies popping up soon. This is also inspiring me to delve into a writer who I have criminally ignored so far in my life: Emile Zola. The Human Beast - along with Germinal and Nana - are part of his twenty novel Les Gougon-Macquart series, which I've also started to download on my Kindle. My excellent friend Sanford has all of them and offered to loan them to me, but the upcoming move makes that an impossibility, so it looks like my new Kindle is going to get a workout. Once I get through my latest Proust re-read, I'm going to tackle Thomas Mann's Buddenbrook, and then it will be on to Zola. The Human Beast is highly recommended, obviously.
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