Tales of Passion, Murder, and a Mysterious Local Creature

This Friday, the Coastside Film Society will screen a locally produced documentary and a foreign film noir classic.

When: Friday, Nov.21 at 7:30 pm
Who: Coastside Film Night is open to the public of all ages.
Where: Methodist Sanctuary,  777 Miramontes, Half Moon Bay (Corner of Johnston & Miramontes)
Donation: $6.00 per person

short: Coastal Creature (3 mins)

Local construction engineer and videographer Rob Carey’s encounter with a mysterious creature lurking on one of our local beaches.

feature: La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) (100 mins)  French w English titles

“A macabre, grim and oddly-fascinating story. Sitting here, a safe distance from it, we are not at all sure we entirely approve.” Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times.

Tense psychological thriller produced in 1938 by the legendary French director Jean Renoir based on a novel by Emile Zola. Railroad engineer Jacques Lantier lusts after Severine, the wife of Roubaud, a railroad station master.  When Lantier stumbles across Roubaud murdering another man who has done Severine wrong, Lantier is faced with many conflicted motivations.  In the course of the film we discover that Lantier has more than a few skeletons lurking in his own closet.  So too does his love Severine.

“Though it is based on a novel written in 1890, Jean Renoir’s 1938 La Bete Humaine is a startlingly modern movie. Indeed, once you’ve read the plot and understand the dynamic at play, you will see that dozens of the best noir classics of the 40s and 50s copied the story line. There’s the flawed loner, the wily, deceptively innocent woman, and a hardheaded husband. Toss in numerous ancillary sins - affairs, mental impairment, uncontrollable rages, long hidden family secrets - and you have the makings of a typical taut genre thriller. But in the hands of the magnificent Renoir,  La Bete Humaine becomes more than just a sensational potboiler. Applying his artistic intuition into this simple story, the director creates a commentary on the cosmopolitan vs. the country, modernization vs. simplification, and the clockwork tenets of the railroad vs. the out of control issues of love.” Bill Gibron, Rotten Tomatoes

For more info see: www.HMBFilm.org