Pépé le Moko

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.

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" (1937) directed by Julien Duvivier - is a wonderful movie with the great performance from very young Jean Gabin. It just happened that I've seen several movies with him in the older age where he is serious, not very talkative man with the head full of grey hair and I like him in the later movies, too but it was so much fun to see him as Pepe - young, charming, dangerous, smart, brutal, irresistible, and so much in love with Paris that he'd lost forever. As much as I enjoyed the film as an early noir and crime, I think it is about the longing for home, about the nostalgia and as such it is even more interesting, deeper, poignant that just a noir. The celebrated film director Max Ophüls, who knew a lot about nostalgia and immigration said about Paris,

"It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night. Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris."

I could not help thinking of his words when I watched the film. There is one scene that almost reduced me to tears - a middle-aged former chanteuse plays one of her records on a gramophone and sings along with her voice that has not changed at all even if she looks nothing like the picture on the wall from the days of her youth. The time may play very nasty jokes with a woman - she may get fat or skinny, lose her teeth and hair but her voice will stay as strong or tender, ringing or melodious as it was in the long gone days that stay forever in her memory. She sings about Paris and there are tears on her eyes and the scene simply can't leave any viewer indifferent. There is another scene - between Pepe and Gaby the girl from Paris with whom Pepe falls in love (Mireille Balin). They talk about Paris remembering different places which are dear to both of them, and in the end, they both named La Place Blanche where they both belong and not in Algiers's Casbah where Pepe is safe and he rules the world of criminals but can't forget the sound of Metro in Paris. When Pepe wants to tell Gaby that he loves her, he tells her that she reminds him of Metro in Paris...

I have not even mentioned how masterfully the film was shot by Julien Duvivier and how well it was acted, how fast it movies, and there are so many wonderful scenes that I have not mentioned...Great, great movie.

Pepe LeMoko first was portrayed on the silver screen by French acting legend Jean Gabin. Despite American versions of this story starring Charles Boyer and Tony Martin, this became the standard the others are measured by.

The Casbah section of old Algiers is where noted thief LeMoko holds sway and the natives accord him demi-god status. No doubt from the fact he's paid off the native population well for protection. An attempt is made by the French occupiers to go in and take him out, but the police are made fools of.

It's hen protection becomes a prison. And the sight of a beautiful and chic French woman played by Mireille Belin sets Pepe to thinking about what he can't have.

Beilin is wonderful in the Delilah role opposite Gabin's Samson. But there's more to it than carnal desire. Pepe lives for his work, the planning and execution of a caper, pitting his wits against law enforcement. His real nemesis Inspector Slimane knows Pepe better than Gabin knows himself. Slimane is played well by Romanian actor Carlos Gridaux.

As for Gabin he creates in Pepe one of the great portrayals of his career. He led a life quite similar to one of the existential characters of his career.

Smartly directed by Julien Duvivier. Pepe holds quite well, as well as the Hollywood version starring Charles Boyer that came out th following year..

This is one not to miss.