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Perfect cast and a good story

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Yes, I know, a trite headline. Apart from the fact that I don't know much French, isn't it uncanny how many tales, fiction and non, have a woman at the heart of matters? So it is with Pepe Le Moko, another poor slob caught in a love affair which costs him dearly. And to think he was the toast of The Casbah, a local hero with all the money and women and friendship he could ask for.Director Duvuvier paints a vivid picture of the sprawling slum that is the Casbah, teeming with humanity and activity, a place that has become a prison - in an abstract sense - for Pepe. The movie sets a fast pace, with barely time to catch your breath as the tension builds towards a climax both anticipated and disheartening - as so often happens, we root for this appealing criminal, hoping the outcome will be different than we expect.Some have said that the film is a 'film noir' prototype, and I agree, even though the genre didn't start until a few years later. If we include it, it is one of the best - the website description of crime/drama/romance lends a mundane feel and doesn't do it justice.

It is true what they say, that this is an early French film noir, before the term film noir was even invented. Jean Gabin is mesmerizing as the charismatic gangster Pépé, who has been holed up in the Casbah of Algiers for two years and unable to get out because only there can he successfully evade the police raids by leaping over the rooftops. The intensity of his stares is well captured on camera by director Julien Duvivier, who worked with Gabin so many times and knew him so well. The film was made on location in Algiers, Algeria being then a French colony. The film is thus marvellously exotic and evocative of the Casbah, more so than the later film which was also set in the Casbah, BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966). Not that the Casbah is in any way flattered by this film, as the characters are continually cursing its lice and its filth. This film was remade in English the following year as ALGIERS (1938), with Charles Boyer as the gangster and Hedy Lamarr as the femme fatale Gaby. Then it was remade again in English as CASBAH (1948) with Tony Martin as the gangster. We can thus chart a steady progression of decline in quality, starting with the original and ending with the second, and rather faint, carbon copy, all based on the same novel by Henri Le Barthe. In this original version, the 28 year-old Mireille Balin plays the femme fatale character Gaby with sizzling intensity. (The story of what happened to Balin in her private life is deeply disturbing, and those who wish to know about it should read her bio on the database.) When Balin and Gabin look at each other 'in that way', we witness en electron in collision with a positron. Inès, the gypsy girl who loves Gabin, is played by Line Noro, who despite her Italian name was French, born in Lorraine. She is continually distraught over the restless 'cabin fever' which is driving Gabin mad with frustration, cooped up as he has been for so long. But when he meets Balin by chance, he is driven even wilder, this time with uncontrollable lust. But that lust represents freedom. He and Balin begin discussing districts and particular streets of Paris and work themselves up into a frenzy of memory for the city they love, and from which they have both been exiled for their different reasons. These scenes remind one of the scenes in Clouzot's film THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953), in which Yves Montand, another French exile in the middle of nowhere, reminisces with one of the other characters in the film about his favourite street near Place St. Michel. If you take French people away from Paris for too long, they quickly become maudlin and go to pieces. And Paris, perhaps more than any other large city in the world, is defined by its particular locations, its specific streets, to those who love it. Nowhere so much as in Paris is the charm of each separate spot so alluring. As Gabin and Balin (strange how similar their surnames were!) work themselves up into a lather of memories of Paris, the unattainable Balin, who is staying in a hotel outside the Casbah, comes to represent for Gabin the equally unattainable Paris, and the impossibility of freedom to roam, so that like a caged panther he strides with manic desperation back and forth, back and forth, as his gypsy gal sees clearly that his doom is coming. And his doom means the end of everything for her, unless she can somehow prevent it. Gabin snaps, bringing on a cascade of dramatic events. This is an excellent film, but not a great one.

One of the significances of Julien Duvivier's "Pepe le Moko" is that Charles Boyer's character from the American remake inspired Pepe Le Pew. But there is definitely more to understand about the movie than that.An important point about this tale of a French gangster (Jean Gabin) hiding from the police in the Algiers casbah, is its status as a pivot. Gangster flicks had become a staple of American cinema in the 1930s, and so France made this film in response. But then this movie influenced film noir. It may have been the original film noir. Also noteworthy is the role of Europe's view of its colonies. Most popular media promoted stereotypical - usually negative - images of non-white peoples. Early in this movie, they note that the casbah is the home of several different ethnic groups (yet they don't mention Arabs). While the movie doesn't necessarily say anything positive about non-white peoples, it doesn't attack them.No matter what the movie says specifically about any group, it remains a formidable piece of cinema history, with its use of poetic realism. The labyrinthine streets of the casbah are like a character on their own. I definitely recommend it. Also starring Line Noro and Mireille Balin.

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.