"La Bête humaine strengthened my longing to achieve poetic realism....The setting of locomotives, railroad sidings and puffs of steam had furnished me with that poetry, or rather had supplied it to the actors..."-Renoir Renoir's contribution to the dark tradition in French cinema was an adaptation of Zola that, as André Bazin noted, avoided entirely the novel's particularly strained "cinematic vision" while rendering Zola's background of social conflict in the documentary-inspired visuals. Jean Gabin earned a place in the hearts of the French people with his portrayal of the working-class hero/victim, Lantier, a devoted engineer on the Paris-Le Havre line who is haunted by the threat of madness inherited from his alcoholic forbears. The station master's wife, Séverine (the feline Simone Simon), herself both femme fatale and victim-of her sex and her class-lures him into her desperate life. "Gabin, with the slightest tremor in his face, could express the most violent feelings," Renoir wrote; his melancholy is nowhere better defined than in the split-second when he looks into a mirror to see the eyes, not so much of a murderer, perhaps, as of a suicide. Out of U.S. distribution in 35mm, La Bête humaine is presented in a special print from England.