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Instant Favorite.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Dashing legionnaire Jean Gabin loses his head over a heartless high maintenance gold-digger played by Mireille Balin. She has no intention of leaving her sugar daddy and it all ends in tears in this glossy star vehicle reuniting the leads of 'Pépé le Moko'. Handsomely mounted and sumptuously photographed by veteran German cameraman Günther Rittau, it looks good but the material scarcely merits the money, talent and care that has gone into its production. The characters are unsympathetic and a thuddingly trite coincidence concerning Gabin's old army buddy René Lefevre is worked into the plot in order to generate a suitably melodramatic conclusion. Gabin's fall from grace because of his infatuation vaguely recalls Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in 'The Blue Angel', with Balin's immaculately dressed femme fatale more poison maiden than great bitch.

The movie business in both Hollywood and France certainly extracted rich pickings from the French Foreign Legion, from Morocco to Beau Geste to Le Grand Jeu, La Bandera et al. Gabin himself was at home in North Africa having spent the entire running time of Pepe Le Moko there and apparently not learning his lesson because here he is again falling for the same femme fatale in the shape of Mireille Balin, his nemesis in both Pepe and here. Trivia buffs may find it interesting that Jean Gremillon studied music at the Scuola Cantorum in Paris at approximately the same time as Cole Porter though I can't, with my hand on my heart, claim this effected Guele d'Amour one way or the other. Gremillon certainly had his moment in the sun - Remorques, La Ciel est a vous - but his name never quite blazed as fiercely as his great contemporaries Duvivier, Carne,Feyder etc and was forgotten more easily and unfairly. This is a fine film exploring a hackneyed theme with fresh eyes and should be sought out.

Jean Gabin is strong in this tale of a handsome man who could have any woman he wants but chooses a psychopath.Like a moth drawn to a flame that he knows will destroy him, Barrouche pursues the kept woman played by Mireille Balin (whose allure I cannot understand -- neither in "Pepe le Moko" nor in this far less powerful work).I enjoyed the scenes in which Gabin gives a piece of his mind to Madeleine, her pimp-like mother, and her snooty servant. I liked less that his nickname translates as "lady killer"...you can see where this plot is heading from a mile away.The final frame of this film is quite poignant and surprising.I liked this movie best for the psychological complexity of Gabin, an intensely attractive man who looks a bit like Kenneth Branagh on a really good day. Non, they just don't make stars like him anymore...

I never heard of this film until I saw it at a recent Gabin retrospective. I loved it, even if it is a case of directorial excess. The film would have been much more subtle if it had ended with Lucian (the Gabin character)returning to Orange and watching the new regiment of soldiers coming in, realizing that he was no longer the "lover boy." But then, it wouldn't have been as much fun.