This 1938 adaptation of a rather schematic and melodramatic novel by Émile Zola wasn't a personal project for the writer-director, Jean Renoir, but he made it his own, and it retains the power to shock over 60 years after its original release. This was a star vehicle for working-class hero Jean Gabin that Renoir molded into something pungent and powerful, a story of a curse of brutality that has been handed down in a family from one generation to the next. (The codependent psychology, if not the mood of doomed determinism, may seem more timely than ever.) The working environment of the protagonist, the railroad mechanic Lantier (Gabin), is depicted with great precision; we can just about smell the coal smoke. And the sequences in which Lantier succumbs helplessly to his inherited inclinations are as terrifying as any of the famous murder passages in Hitchcock. For a man with such a high reputation for gentleness and tolerance, the cinema's great humanist was very good at violence: it's worth recalling that almost all of his major and many of his minor films pivot upon vividly imagined brutal crimes. Nothing human was alien to him, not even the pathology of this loathsome "human beast." "--David Chute"