Renoir was not only a prolific film author, but also very good at handling scripts. He transplanted Zola's famous works into French society at that time, which produced the due social effects.
The film depicts the ideological status of the French working class before World War II. The train worker played by Jean Gaben worked hard from morning to night and rarely had a rest. He occasionally falls into an extramarital affair, and his mistress asks him to kill her husband and elope with her, but Gaben escapes. But he was troubled by love again. When emotions could not be resolved, he killed the woman and committed suicide again. The final summary of the movie was "He destroyed himself."
This movie always reminds me of Baker's "Golden Helmet" and Carne's "Dawn of Heaven". It's all about working-class love issues. The heavy physical labor makes the workers exhausted physically and mentally, and they are in the lower class of society, and they, like everyone else, yearn for a rich spiritual life, they look forward to getting off work, so that they can wear decent clothes and participate in the dance party. , Participate in social interaction. On such occasions, they can often meet the person of their dreams. This was originally an extremely normal worldly life, but for workers, love is dangerous, exposing their own fragility in real life. They are either asked to kill people and overtake goods in this film, or they kill their rivals because of jealousy in Carne's "Daybreak". The poisonous love medicine dies in real life, making them unable to survive.
Renoir is also basically realistic, not only in the way he cares about the lives and realities of the lower class people like Zola, but also in the methods of film expression. The roar of the train, the preparation of killing with a stick, the joy of cheating... He is also subjective, bringing us into the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist.
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