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Based on Emile Zola’s 1980 novel La Bête Humaine, Fritz Lang’s Human Desire is an entirely different beast than Jean Renoir’s 1938 adaptation. The Renoir film’s pointed humanism and everybody-has-their-reasons ethos is swapped out here for a considerably steelier point of view. Indeed, the film is less interested in its characters’ interiority than it is in viewing their lives through a fatalistic lens.

What’s most compelling about Lang’s film is how elegantly it toys with noir tropes and subverts our expectations, particularly with regard to Vicki (Gloria Grahame), who’s initially presented as your prototypical femme fatale. Vicki is trying to convince her new lover, Jeff (Glenn Ford), to murder her slovenly, abusive husband, Carl (Broderick Crawford). It’s a setup familiar from countless noirs, most notably Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, so the audience is already...

27 January 1939: He has refused to make films in Hollywoood, or indeed anywhere save in France, because he insists that a nation’s films must not have foreigners at their head

Fleet Street, Thursday

M Jean Renoir may be one of the four or five French directors who are making their nation’s films the best in the world, yet when one spoke with him to-day he was concerned much less about films than about “the disaster of Barcelona.” That realist attitude seemed, somehow, typical of a man of the French cinema – a man who does not regard himself as of a race apart, like the film lords in other countries so often do.

M Renoir is a burly sandy-haired, vigorous Parisian. His experience of film direction goes back to Nana and the silent days. La Chienne – prohibited in Britain – was his first talkie, and a fine one. La Grande Illusion...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959) is playing August 3 - September 2, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.Jean Renoir frequently focused on complicated characters who toe the line between right and wrong. They are often trapped by social mores, for better or for worse. In works like The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) or The River (1951), characters are unfairly confined, while in films like La chienne (1931) or La bête humaine (1938), a breaking from custom is fatally dangerous. Even in more light-hearted fare, such as French Cancan (1954), a bold flaunting of convention is cause for conflict and scandal. It seems only logical, then, that Renoir in his interest in the imposed customs of community and the social construction of morals would be drawn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...

Glenda Jackson: Actress and former Labour MP. Two-time Oscar winner and former Labour MP Glenda Jackson returns to acting Two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson set aside her acting career after becoming a Labour Party MP in 1992. Four years ago, Jackson, who represented the Greater London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, announced that she would stand down the 2015 general election – which, somewhat controversially, was won by right-wing prime minister David Cameron's Conservative party.[1] The silver lining: following a two-decade-plus break, Glenda Jackson is returning to acting. Now, Jackson isn't – for the time being – returning to acting in front of the camera. The 79-year-old is to be featured in the Radio 4 series Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money, described on their website as a “mash-up” adaptation of 20 Emile Zola novels collectively known as "Les Rougon-Macquart."[2] Part 1 of the three-part Radio 4 series will be broadcast daily during an...

Simone Simon: Remembering the 'Cat People' and 'La Bête Humaine' star (photo: Simone Simon 'Cat People' publicity) Pert, pretty, pouty, and fiery-tempered Simone Simon – who died at age 94 ten years ago, on Feb. 22, 2005 – is best known for her starring role in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic Cat People (1942). Those aware of the existence of film industries outside Hollywood will also remember Simon for her button-nosed femme fatale in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938).[1] In fact, long before Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, and Barbarella's Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm – with a tad of puppy dog wistfulness – in a film career that spanned two continents and a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

'Cat People' 1942 actress Simone Simon Remembered: Starred in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic (photo: Simone Simon in 'Cat People') Pert, pouty, pretty Simone Simon is best remembered for her starring roles in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie Cat People (1942) and in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938). Long before Brigitte Bardot, Mamie Van Doren, Ann-Margret, and (for a few years) Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm in a film career that spanned a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both sides of the Atlantic – at times, with fatal results. During that period, Simon was featured in nearly 40 movies in France, Italy, Germany, Britain, and Hollywood. Besides Jean Renoir, in her native country she worked for the likes of Jacqueline Audry...

Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the second of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.

Passion...

Following the announcement that came earlier this week, launching yet another hugely impressive line-up at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, the respective line-up has now been announced for what is in some ways its European counterpart, the 2013 Venice Film Festival.

The announcement shows that the two will continue to have a number of films overlapping, including Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (the Opening Night Film in Venice), Peter Landesman’s Parkland, Stephen Frears’ Philomena, and more. But it also brings with its news of where a number of films will be making their debut, including Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem; the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises; James Franco’s Child of God; Lee Sang-il’s Yurusarezaru Mono, the Japanese remake of Unforgiven; and Steven Knight’s Locke, led by Tom Hardy, and shot in one take.

In Competition

Es-Stouh – Merzak Alloucache (Algeria, France, 94’) L’Intrepido – Gianni Amelio (Italy,...

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale to be guest host for the section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival where William Friedkin will receive a lifetime achievement honour.

Claudia Cardinale, best known for roles in Once Upon a Time in the West and Fellini’s 8 ½, is to be the guest host of Venezia Classici, the section devoted to restored films and to documentaries about cinema of the 70th Venice International Film Festival (August 28 – September 7.

The section, introduced last year, features a selection of classic film restorations completed over the past year by film libraries, cultural institutions or production companies around the world.

Cardinale will attend the screening of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, Luchino Visconti’s 1965 film in which she starred that won the Golden Lion at the 30th Viff and has been restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

It is is one of the four classics restored this year that has been conserved at the Historic Archives of the...

Gilles Bourdos's film about the passion of the elderly impressionist for a young woman glows with the painter's own delight in the body and its pleasures

It's good to see a film about the private life of an artist that is not judgmental about his need for sex and beauty.

Renoir, directed by Gilles Bourdos and starring Michel Bouquet as the impressionist master, is the story of an old man's obsession with a young woman. It is set during the first world war, almost entirely on Pierre-Auguste Renoir's estate in the south of France. Renoir is old and ill, but his artistic fire burns bright, rekindled by a new model, Andrée, played by Christa Théret.

Cue a lot of nakedness in the golden light of Provence. Théret poses for Renoir in his studio, in a meadow, in a stream. The wizened, almost immobile old artist is unembarrassed. He knows what he likes.

Acre After Acre, Mile After Mile, London

If you've had the feeling in recent years that British cinema has become a story of steadily eroding national identity, then here's where you need to be looking. The season's subtitle – Tradition, Memory & Journey In British Folk Cinema – tells you what you need to know: that there's a solid, albeit underfunded, core of film-makers still out there looking for the soul of Britain, and many of them crop up here. Like Chris Petit, who this Thursday accompanies his seminal late-70s road trip Radio On. Or Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair, who'll be previewing their pedalo-powered journey to the Olympics later. Or, fresh to their ranks, Ben Rivers, here with his Scottish wilderness film Two Years At Sea. Look out too for more commercial fare such as The Long Good Friday and The Elephant Man.

Sugar House Studios, E15, Thu to 28 Jun

Jean Gabin,...

In the 1930s, with Europe on the brink of war, director Jean Renoir found inspiration in Pierre-Auguste's tranquil paintings

In Jean Renoir's film Boudu Saved from Drowning, a Parisian bookseller dives into the river Seine to rescue a homeless man who has thrown himself off a bridge. He is acclaimed as a hero for saving Boudu, but finds he also has to invite this wild-bearded clownish character to live with him. The bookshop-owner's cosy lifestyle, including his affair with the maid, is turned upside down as Boudu refuses to accept bourgeois rules and manners (I am not using the term bourgeois in an abusive or Marxist way – it is how the characters describe themselves).

Boudu Saved from Drowning is as comic and accessible as anyone could want, and as profound as a great novel. It is ambiguous and rich in the way art ought to be: the meaning of...

Reporting on the original 3-D outbreak in 1953, Manny Farber wrote of the technique’s visual potential: “Along with the sharpening of the outline of bodies, there is an effort to clarify the feeling of negative spaces—the spaces in a composition that are more or less unfilled.” Nearly five decades later, Martin Scorsese employs the technique to leave no space unfilled. In Hugo, he introduces the setting—Paris’ Montparnasse train station circa 1931—with an impossibly vertiginous, digitally-lubricated zoom that races past costumed passengers and smoky locomotives until it comes to rest on the retina of the eponymous orphan (Asa Butterfield). As sparrowish Hugo hides between the station’s meshing gears and tends to its many clocks, no chance is missed to endow images with a sense of depth: Diagonals and curves are the preferred forms, snow falls and pages flutter as if inches away from the 3-D glasses, a Doberman...

Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, La Bête Humaine Jean Gabin on TCM: Grand Illusion, Pepe Le Moko, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Gueule D'Amour (1937) A retired cavalry officer discovers the woman who won his heart was in love with the uniform. Dir: Jean Grémillon. Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin. Bw-88 mins. 8:00 Am Remorques (1941) A married tugboat captain falls for a woman he rescues from a sinking ship. Dir: Jean Grémillon. Cast: Jean Gabin, Alain Cuny, Bw-83 mins. 9:30 Am Le Jour Se Leve (1939) A young factory worker loses the woman he loves to a vicious schemer. Dir: Marcel Carne. Cast: Jean Gabin, Jacqueline Laurent, Arletty. Bw-90 mins. 11:00 Am L'air De Paris (1954) An over-the-hill boxer stakes his fortune on training a young railroad-worker. Dir: Marcel Carne. Cast: Arletty, Jean Gabin, Roland Lesaffre. Bw-100 mins. 1:00 Pm Leur Derniere Nuit (1953) A schoolteacher...

Jean Gabin was France's answer to Humphrey Bogart, many (English-language) historians have claimed. Either that, or Gabin was France's answer to Spencer Tracy. Never mind the fact that Gabin was a major international star before either Bogart or Tracy achieved Hollywood stardom. In other words, if there was someone emulating someone else, it was Bogart and Tracy who followed the Frenchman's lead so as to become the American Jean Gabins. Turner Classic Movies is devoting a whole day to Jean Gabin's movies today, August 18, as part of its "Summer Under the Stars" series. [Jean Gabin Movie Schedule.] Right now, TCM is showing Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937), the tale of a Parisian gangster (Gabin) hiding in Algiers' Casbah neighborhood, but who becomes careless after he falls for a beautiful woman (Mireille Balin, Gabin's co-star that same year in Jean Grémillon's Gueule d'amour / Lady Killer). Those whose idea of cinema begins...

Everett Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Goddard’s film “Breathless” (1960)

Since the competing claims of Edison and the Lumières to have invented the cinema, France and America have amassed two immensely rich but so often opposed film heritages. The attitude that has driven the American cinema was expressed by Sam Goldwyn when he observed, “Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.” The well-crafted narrative rules in Hollywood, which has had little time for Jean-Luc Godard’s comment...

Festival-goers will be able to enjoy director's 'own subtle, spectral presence' through his playful choice of films

Martin Scorsese's four specially chosen double bills at the Port Eliot Festival is another reminder of his reputation as someone committed to preserving movie history. It's also part of the new curatorial fashion in film festivals: a big name will be asked to curate (sometimes at long-distance) a strand by personally selecting a number of films with a unifying idea or theme and then putting their name to the resulting event, perhaps with some well-chosen words for the programme. The local organisers do the legwork, locating the actual cans of film, or DVDs, and scheduling the projections.

Scorsese's choices here are droll, and the presence of a railway viaduct at Port Eliot is significant. Murder On The Orient Express is about a murder on a train. Hitchcock's North By Northwest has legendary train scenes.

From the pioneers of the silver screen to today's new realism, French directors have shaped film-making around the world

France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.

But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.

The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...

Movies about trains are ridiculous, moronic and hysterically illogical. Keep it real, rail

Motion pictures, by their very nature, require audiences to suspend their disbelief. Unless we are willing to believe that a short Caucasian from south Philadelphia could battle his way to the heavyweight championship of the world, we cannot enjoy the Rocky movies. Unless we believe that great white sharks are incredibly intelligent and almost impossible to kill, we cannot enjoy Jaws. Unless we are willing to take a brief sabbatical from reality, storing common sense in the larder, we cannot enjoy movies as varied as The Dark Knight, Ben-Hur, King Kong, Slumdog Millionaire, The Matrix and Harry Potter. Yea, unless we are willing to become children again, we can never enter the kingdom of cinema.

For whatever the reason, I can never suspend my disbelief with films involving trains. Train movies always strike me as ridiculous and stupid.

The power of trains and the terror of one getting out of control, as both something real and a metaphor for modern life, were subjects of great fascination for writers of the Victorian era. Dickens himself survived a major rail disaster and went on to write the horrific ghost story The Signal-Man; Zola's La Bête humaine is set in the railway world and ends with a runaway train taking its passengers to their deaths. The cinema picked up this preoccupation, and Tony Scott's Unstoppable, a white-knuckle thriller, is in a tradition that includes Bernard Vorhaus's British B-movie classic The Last Journey (1935) in which Godfrey Tearle goes berserk driving an express locomotive in the West Country, and the Hollywood Runaway Train, scripted by Akira Kurosawa and shown in competition at Cannes in 1986.

Scott's picture is set in rust belt Pennsylvania and is a tribute to blue-collar Americans. It stars...

There seems to be no exhausting the raw eyeball pleasure to be had from old-fashioned handmade (or semi-handmade, or whatever) animation, and we may be well living through a pop renaissance of it.

The eruptions below the Pixar/Dreamworks budget tier have been spectacular and international, beginning perhaps with 2003's "The Triplets of Belleville," learning from Miyazaki, Oshii, Aardman and the Quays, moving on to Kim Moon-saeng's "Sky Blue," machinima, "The Corpse Bride," "A Scanner Darkly," "Persepolis," "Coraline," "Waltz with Bashir," "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Mary & Max," "Sita Sings the Blues," "Fear(s) in the Dark," "The Secret of Kells," and now the Belgian nonpareil "A Town Called Panic."

The variety of toolboxes and styles at work seem limitless (the seductive but uniform look of pure 3D computer animation is getting tiresome just as other approaches proliferate), but it's the personal engagement that makes most of the films sing.

Many of...