|
Raging furnace, soot-covered goggles and landscapes stretched by the train's hurtling POV—an exhilarating overture, along with a foreglimpse of Kubrick's Star Gate (2001: A Space Odyssey). "Waves of grief" seize the engineer (Jean Gabin), psychotic moods linked to ancestral illness and not quite soothed by beloved machines. The stationmaster (Fernand Ledoux) kills the goatish moneybags who had his way with his wife (Simone Simon), the crime unfolds behind blinds as the Paris-La Havre express heads into a tunnel: "That one minute was more intense than all the rest of my life combined." The protagonist notices them while smoking a cigarette, lust for the missus ensures his silence and locks them into a destructive triangle. "I forgot, you're married to a locomotive." An expansive director adapting a deterministic author, thus Jean Renoir sees Zola's rigid lines as breathing contours. (A train zips across the screen, the camera tilts down from the bridge to find Blanchette Brunoy soaking her ankles in the river.) The physicality of the world before the abstraction of destiny, faces within arrangements of engine grease and steam, an entrapping window that frames characters discussing girls and cooking omelets. The illicit couple consummate their desire in a railroad shed during a downpour (locked door, overflowing barrel, sunshine), the decision to bump off the husband is a lead pipe picked up in the yard and glimpsed as an upside-down reflection in a muddy puddle. Chanson et sang, cp. La Chienne, the ditty at the workers' dance hall carries over to the dark boudoir where Simon's corpse lies on a bed and a mirror catches the terrible opacity in Gabin's eyes. "Now there'll be a solid bond between us." The stoker (Julien Carette) provides the tragic epitaph at the close, and Lang the geometric recomposition in Hollywood. Cinematography by Curt Courant. With Gérard Landry, Jenny Hélia, Colette Régis, Claire Gérard, Charlotte Clasis, Jacques Berlioz, and Renoir. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |