Pépé le Moko

A gang of thieves hide out above Algiers in the Arab section of the city, the Casbah, in "Pepe le Moko," a 1937 film - an homage to the U. S. gangster movie - that is often credited as the inspiration for the film noir craze that swept U. S. cinema.

In order to draw attention to the American version, "Algiers," producer Walter Wanger tried to destroy all copies, subsequently buying the rights to keep it off the screen. But you can't keep a good movie down.

Pepe le Moko (Jean Gabin) is wanted by the police, so if he leaves the crowded and maze-like Casbah to go into town, they will nail him. There is an inspector who keeps an eye on Pepe, Inspector Slimane.

Pepe and the inspector have become friends, but Pepe knows Slimane is just waiting for him to make his move. When Pepe meets the exotic and bejeweled Gaby, a situation presents itself where he might risk his freedom.

Pepe is the great French actor Jean Gabin, a marvelous-looking, rugged actor with tremendous magnetism. It's no wonder Marlene Dietrich chased him all over the world.

Gabin's Pepe is the forerunner of the Bogart persona - he's a confident, handsome man, dismissive of women and has the ability to be both funny and cruel. He lives with his devoted girlfriend, Ines, and is surrounded by his motley mob who are familiar with the seedier side of life.

There are some brilliant moments and great performances in this film, which is rich in atmosphere and interesting faces. The French star Mireille Balin, whose real-life story is more bizarre than any fiction, is Gaby, a kept woman who enchants le Moko as they talk about their great love for Paris, most especially, Place Blanche.

Line Noro is Ines, doomed to love and lose Pepe, and Frehel is Tania, a friend. In one of the best scenes in the film, Tania reminisces about her youth and sings along with her own recording. A wonderful artist. The entire cast is marvelous.

The director, Julien Duvivier, orchestrates the proceedings with tremendous style and tension, capturing the heat, the light and the sounds of the Casbah.

Often imitated - by "The Third Man," "Odd Man Out," "Casablanca," "The Time Of Your Life," "To Have And Have Not," "The Wages of Fear," -- and let's not forget Pepe le Pew - "Pepe le Moko" and Jean Gabin's Pepe stand on their own as hallmarks in film history.

It's not so surprising that this film originally bore the working title of "Les Nuits Blanches", as it certainly shares more than a passing resemblance to Dostoevsky's timeless tale and Visconti's mesmeric adaptation. "Pepe Le Moko" is, more than anything else, a love story, though it functions more as a commentary on the dynamics and nature of love than an exultation in its virtues. Like Dostoevsky's hapless dreamers, Duvivier's characters are in love with phantoms, incorporeal fantasies that they project onto canvas of flesh. Naturally, idealism and reality are hopelessly estranged, and efforts of reconciliation can only precipitate frustration and tragedy.

Pepe le Moko is a tormented fugitive and exile, liege lord of a vice-ridden, sweltering microcosm and crown fool. Like the swaggering, stolid gangsters of Jean-Pierre Melville, Pepe is a victim of himself, prisoner of arbitrary codes of masculinity and honor. His hauteur are undermined by the minuteness of his empire, itself infested with conspirators eager to sell him to the police. His "freedom" itself is pathetic enough to be risible, venturing outside the insular sanctuary and he is fair game for the police. Clinging doggedly to whatever semblance of liberty he has left, Pepe acts out a tragic comedy within the confines of his circumscribed universe, his roles of Don Juan and Capone underscored by pathos and ennui.

When a flighty Parisienne catches a glimpse of the fabled kingpin, she becomes instantly infatuated with his imperious manner, seeing him and the bloodthirsty world he represents as salvation from her stuffy bourgeois existence. In Aeschylean fashion, neither Pepe nor said femme fatale love one another, they merely love effigies, ideals. The female is Pepe's solitary conduit to his beloved Paris and the only confidante for his crippling homesickness. His indifference to her extravagant jewelry reveals the absolute arbitrariness of his criminal pursuits, a mere pretext for action in such boring climes. Yet, the viewer is acutely aware that the Paris Pepe longs for no longer exists, if it is represented by the addle-brained, vacuous Sybarites that his lover surrounds herself with. The mere fact that a Parisienne would exalt him as her liberator should itself alert him to the folly of his reveries. Sustained by his illusions, Pepe withdraws further from reality. Everything about Jean Gabin's character makes me want to cry- his fragile stoicism, his crestfallenness, his obsessive delusion, his self-destructiveness.

There are some who would take issue with the implicit ethnocentrism in the "Casbah" imagery. Note that this was an adaptation of a novel written in the midst of fervent pro-colonial sentiment, and that, in Duvivier's hands, the Casbah becomes mythic, poetic, allegorical. The impenetrable veils of smoke are almost Cocteau-esquire, giving the film the sensuous richness of Scheheradze's chambers. At the same time, the mists accent Pepe's self-deception- his entire persona is fictive, as are his illusions of freedom and escape. The sequence of Pepe's fevered sprint toward the harbor may be maligned nowadays for its visual sloppiness, but I think it's absolutely marvelous, masterfully capturing Pepe's childlike impetuousness. As Pepe courses onward, the surrounding Casbah gradually blurs around him, the juxtaposition of back/foreground indicating his flight from one fantasy into another, as well as highlighting the sheer depth of his delusory monomania and tunnel-visioned myopia. As psychology transformed into image, this one works.

Beyond everything, Pepe Le Moko is a deeply cynical film, its slightly jaundiced perspective on human nature reminding one of Clouzot, Hitchcock and Joseph Conrad. The entire film is a tight lattice of interwoven self-interests- look at the Parisienne's corpulent, autocratic husband, the obsence, oleaginous Regis and the servile, serpentine Slimane for some fine examples of the vile characters on display. Even the character who loves deeply and truly, the forbearing Ines, would rather betray Pepe than be estranged from him...a commentary on the covetous, self-serving nature of love, perhaps?

I haven't seen any other Duvivier films, but he doesn't seem to be the humanist that Becker and Renoir are, and I can appreciate him all the more for that. Like Becker, he seems to have been largely misunderstood and under-appreciated in his time, at least on these shores, and the interview appended on the Criterion disk suggest that he was a retiring and modest sort, never garrulous about his art (and hesitant to even think of it as art, which it assuredly is). What a film this is....a terrific achievement. I love the golden age of French cinema, and this affirms and reinforces that affection.

Pepe le Moko marks a fundamental step in the aesthetic development of european cinema. It is also one of many great crime films of the thirties that is sadly overlooked in many critics top 100 lists.

Through it's lush sense of location and character Duvivier builds up a sweaty, exotic and complex picture of the underworld life of the Kasbah and the vast panorama of engagingly seedy characters especially Pepe le Moko, played with such effortlessly charismatic ease by Jean Gabin. But it is the rich claustrophobic atmosphere and the relentless pressure of the police that powers this film along to it's elegantly tragic conclusion. A masterpiece, and the clearest fore-runner to the whole film noir genre.

In the 30's, in Algeria, the charming Parisian gangster Pépé le Moko (Jean Gabin) rules in the district of Casbah. Surrounded and protected by the women and his gang, he is unattainable by the French and Algerian police forces, but also he has been imprisoned in the area for two years. The police unsuccessfully try to bring Pépé le Moko to the center of Algiers to capture him, and he misses his former life in Paris and Marseilles. The astute and ambiguous Algerian inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux) promises to arrest Pépé le Moko the day he leaves Casbah. When Pépé meets the French Gaby Gould (Mireille Balin), she represents everything he misses in his life, and he has a crush on her, bringing a fatal jealousy in his mate, Inès (Line Noro).

"Pépé le Moko" is a great film-noir, with a good romance and excellent locations. The screenplay is very well developed, showing clearly the maze where Pépé is trapped, and explaining each character very well. Jean Gabin has an excellent performance in the role of a seductive criminal; Mireille Balin is extremely elegant, wearing beautiful costumes; and Lucas Gridoux is perfect in the role of the smart inspector Slimane. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "O Demônio da Algéria" ("The Demon of Algeria")

The term film-noir didn't got handled until the '40's but this term would also really apply to this movie. It features all of the film-noir ingredients with its story as well as its atmosphere.

The movie isn't as smooth or expensive and good looking as an American movie but otherwise there is not much wrong with it. It features a typical crime story in which a Parisian gangster hides in Algeria. Combined with this get the usual factors such as romance and a tough main character, who of course also shows his humane side. It has a solid story that is typical for the genre and therefore for the regular genre viewer won't feature many surprises in it but it's for them also nice and interesting to see how this typical film-noir ingredients all got handled in a '30's, before the film-noir got even really truly invented.

But because the movie isn't American this of course also means that this movie is a 'different' one to watch. It features often some more interesting camera-angles and style of editing. It makes some of the sequences really great to look at. It also has a good and pleasant pace and is skillfully being directed by Julien Duvivier.

It's also a movie that got greatly carried by its principal actor Jean Gabin. He plays his character in the right way for the movie. He's a criminal but you still like him. It's a great character played by a great actor. Not all of the supporting actors are just as good however and act in a more typical kind of '30's over-the-top acting style, though the movie does feature some more great characters.

The movie got for some part shot in Algeria itself but some sequence are also sometimes painfully obvious studio-work. It's the foremost reason why the movie at times has a sort of cheap and less smooth look over it. The movie did became a success though and even managed to get an American release. This success inspired Hollywood to make one year later an American remake of this movie, called "Algiers", starring French born actor Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr.

A real fine late '30's French crime drama, which really can be seen as an early film-noir.

9/10

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