Film: Pépé le Moko
Director: Julien Duvivier
Country: France
Released: January 1937
Runtime: 94 minutes
Genre: Thriller
Studio: Joinville
Influenced: Michael Curtiz, Graham Greene, Victor Burgin, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville
When I think of classic French cinema, this film always comes to mind. I studied Pépé Le Moko aged 19 as part of my French degree film studies module, and it's stuck with me ever since. There's an irony about the film's US reception in that director Duvivier had seen Howard Hawks' classic 1932 movie Scarface and hoped to make his own gangster film to rival it, only to discover two years later that American studios instead preferred to remake his film as Algiers with English-speaking actors. To add to the ignominy, the film was remade again in America as an even more unwatchable musical called Casbah (1948).
Pépé Le Moko is the only version worth your time, a fatalistic romantic thriller and a classic example of that golden age of poetic realist French film noirs during the 1930s, a new genre that would inspire the "policier" films that flourished in France after WWII. Jean Gabin is exceptional as the gangster who finds love but loses his freedom. One of the film's most heartrending scenes is when Gabin, homesick for his beloved Paris, comes across a Métro ticket and then proceeds to reel off the names of the stations.
The other star of the film is the Casbah, although quite rightly the film has been criticised for its exotic, colonialist portrayal of the Algiers citadel. There's a fabulous, evocative montage scene of the Casbah early in the film that underscores that colonialist sense of somewhere alien, especially to the French detectives who have come in search of Pépé. Duvivier did shoot some of the film on location, but much of the Casbah was shot at Joinville Studios in Paris using extensive and expensive sets.
The film's influence was surprisingly wide, with European novelists like Graham Greene and Italo Calvino praising its virtues, director Michael Curtiz taking inspiration from it when he created Casablanca (1942) and even Looney Tunes' animated French skunk Pépé Le Pew was based on Gabin's character. For me, the film's lasting appeal is in its portrayal of a working-class hero with all his flaws living off his wits, plus the way Duvivier elevates the gangster film into the realm of poetry. It's both dated and timeless.
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