La Bête Humaine (English: The Human Beast and Judas Was a Woman) is a 1938 French crime drama film directed by Jean Renoir, with cinematography by Curt Courant.

Lantier is a railway engine driver obsessively tied to his locomotive, in part because his work distracts him from recurring headaches and violent rages that happen when he is with a woman and become worse when he drinks.

He tells her he no longer has the attacks of violence, but then has one when he meets Flore, an attractive young woman he knew as a little girl.

The two walk and sit beside the railway, but as they embrace, his hands tighten on her neck, and he is stopped from strangling her only by the distracting roar of a passing train.

Roubaud, the deputy stationmaster at Le Havre, is married to Séverine, who formerly worked for her wealthy godfather Grandmorin.

With Roubaud's encouragement, Séverine asks Lantier not to tell the police what he knows, and the murder is pinned on a habitual criminal, Cabouche.

Meeting in secret during a rainstorm, their passion is suggested by an overflowing rain barrel as they begin an affair.

After its completion, Renoir read the screenplay to Gabin's producer Robert Hakim, who asked for "trifling modifications".

[4] Frank Nugent, critic for The New York Times, gave La Bête Humaine a positive review even though he felt uncomfortable watching the film, writing: It is hardly a pretty picture, dealing as it does with a man whose tainted blood subjects him to fits of homicidal mania, with a woman of warped childhood who shares her husband's guilty secret of murder...