Fernand Ledoux looks like a French Michael Ironside.

By mixing elements of romance and jealousy, a femme fatale and a murder mystery, this is about as close as a poetic realist movie gets to Hollywood. It is recognizably a Jean Renoir, featuring elegant directing, dryly humorous small talk from Jean Gabin, and no particular aversion to lust and sex, but otherwise relatively underwhelming.

799

Gabin is great, Simone Simon is super-cute and dangerous, and all the shots of trains are great. I like the Lang version a little better, but this is fine.

#841

There are better Gabin-featured examples of Poetic Realism from the period, but this one's still worth a watch. Great final act.

It isn't really all that interesting until the last 40 minutes.

The romance progresses in a rather dull manner with some nice cinematic flair along the way. Suddenly amongst a seemingly average old French movie are these simply brilliant scenes on trains. I don't know what it was that captured me so much, but all the different angles of high-speed land motion were thrilling and fantastic. This powerful and plainly visceral reaction to what could be said to be a mildly ancillary aspect of the entire scope of the film was unexpected but not unwelcome.

# 708

Semi-thrilling and somewhat interesting, but I didn't care about Jean Gabin that much. I bet the novel is better.

Seemed diffuse. Didn't really go anywhere.

A truly different film, not like most films I have seen. Renoir blends comedy, drama, and one of the most jaw dropping scenes I have ever seen. Gabin is marvelous, as well as most of the cast (Renoir in a great cameo role). A really dark, and in some ways surreal picture, one that is way ahead of its time.

A corker of a thriller, laying many of the foundations of the film noir and featuring another top-drawer performance from Jean Gabin as well as Renoir at his most effortlessly brilliant. This movie, apart from being hugely enjoyable, has also given my life the purpose of building a time machine and going back to late thirties france to court and, shortly thereafter, commence a bout of excessively rough intercourse with one Simone Simon. Because damn.

762

Renoir depicts a crime of passion, love giving rise to violence. Even with such tragic subject matter, his compassion for people is still evident. The tortured Jacques is played well by Gabin, though Simone Simon is a drawback as the dense and fickle female. Renoir's pictures are always filmed with such elegance that you hardly even notice him at work, and this one in particular just floats along with a sense of foreboding and inescapable fate unlike anything else he's done.

Superb performance from Gabin. A few parts get a bit silly but on the whole it's quite riveting and enjoyable.