This French classic is magic. Every
shot and frame of the 1937 film Pépé le Moko shows that French director Julien
Duvivier knew how to make a good movie.
In this instance Duvivier achieved
more than that. He struck on the formula for creating the magical look and
atmosphere of that surreal black-and-white land of which a middle-aged
Hollywood B-picture actor soon would become king.
The formula goes something like
this: a charismatic, streetwise middle-aged man, a lovely young woman, and a
supporting cast of louche if not criminal eccentrics mix in an improbable
potboiler detective plot set in an exotic place.
The sets are sumptuous and
alluring; in this instance, orientalist art deco with palms and ‘natives’ in
fezzes and djellabas. Expressionistic
lighting and camera angles heighten the drama. A western orchestra sways to
an eastern flute. The camera swans from shot to shot, episode to episode, from
one beautiful image to the next as though in a dream. Things happen ‘and then,’
following the patterns of dreams rather than the more prosaic rationales of
quotidian life. The protagonist’s dreamlike ‘anxiety’ is that he is trapped in
this place.
Sounds a bit like Casablanca (1942),
doesn’t it?
Duvivier reportedly took his cue
from Howard Hawk’s Scarface
(1932), refashioned here in the so-called French ‘poetic realism’ style with
the beautiful Jean Gabin rather than the demonic Paul Muni. United Artists in
turn dutifully remade Pépé le Moko in Hollywood as Algiers (1938) with
Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. Warner Brothers took a flier on
Humphrey Bogart in the war propaganda/romance set in American expatriate Rick
Blaine’s eponymous saloon in Casablanca.
A goofy aspect of Duvivier’s
makeover is that George Raft’s signature coin-flipping in Scarface
became le Moko henchman Jimmy (Gaston Modot) playing with a bilbo catcher—a
child’s game that involves catching a ball on a stick. Le Moko’s other
henchman, Max (Roger Legris), wears a permanently dopey grin that suggests he
has had no trouble finding kif.
The ‘romance’ of the genre, such as
it is, slips through a door left ajar by an improbable plot: hard-bitten
characters who purport to be motivated by self-interest or greed turn out to
have airier, loftier, even irrational turns of mind that make the ending all
but impossible to guess.
Will le Moko risk capture and a
long prison term for love by leaving the Kasbah? Who will lay hands on the
priceless ‘black bird’ (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), the ‘letters of
transit’ authorizing exit to neutral Portugal from Vichy-ruled Morocco (Casablanca),
or turn up the long-lost son-in-law (The Big Sleep, 1946)? Sometimes
even the director and screenwriter did not know until the end; often they shot
alternative endings.
Woody Allen beautifully recreates a
fan’s longing to inhabit this magical kingdom, the protagonist’s wish to escape
it, and a filmmaker’s desire to capture it, in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).
Standing on its own, Pépé le Moko may be a
perfect movie because it tells its story as artfully and efficiently as a
dream.
Jean Gabin plays the notorious
French criminal of the title who eludes police by taking refuge in the storied
Kasbah of Algiers, the native quarter of one of France’s then colonial cities,
where he lives like a pasha with his outlaw gang.
The sobriquet ‘le Moko’ refers to
people from the French Mediterranean seaport Toulon, where speakers of Occitan
dialects such as Provençal which preceded French used expressions such as es
como co rather than the French c'est comme ça (that’s the
way it is), or em’ aco?
rather than et avec ça?
(and with that?). This prompted the French from outside the region to call the
locals ‘moco’s.’
But this Pépé evidently became ‘le
Moko’ when he got away with ‘two million’ in a Toulon heist in which he used
machine guns. Moreover, one of le Moko’s key dramatic vulnerabilities in this
story is his homesickness for Paris, the city he claims as his home.
He traffics in stolen jewelry and has
no qualms using a handgun, though his ‘thieves’ honor’ or ‘sporting nature’ has
him shoot pursuing policemen in the legs only, to warm them off by laming but
not killing them. This probably is not a good plan against a modern SWAT team,
and may have been far-fetched for le Moko’s time.
Le Moko is middle-aged, but
dashing; he has flair and panache. Duvivier’s camera makes Gabin glow.
A chance encounter brings him in
contact with Gisèle ‘Gaby’ Gould (Mireille Balin), the beautiful young mistress
of the wealthy and much older Maxime Kleep, ‘of Kleep Champagnes’ (Charles
Granval). Gaby, a younger associate of Kleep’s and that associate’s mistress
are French tourists slumming in the native quarter.
Le Moko and Gaby fall in love—he
more with her. Le Moko sparks her romantic imagination and she feeds his
homesickness for Paris and his desire to leave the Kasbah.
The wily native Inspecteur Slimane
(Lucas Gridoux) plays on le Moko’s love and homesickness to try to draw him out
of the quarter to arrest him. If le Moko leaves the Kasbah, can he elude the
police dragnet? Will Gaby leave her sugar daddy to share le Moko’s uncertain
but beguilingly romantic future?
Balin, a popular actress in the
1930s who starred opposite Gabin in this film as well as Gueule d'amour [Lady
Killer] (1937), apparently came close to her own poetic realist end.
She continued to work in
German-occupied Paris, where she fell in love with Birl Desbok, a German Army
officer. She and Desbok fled the city shortly before the Allies crossed the
Seine in August 1944, but free French forces caught them in the south the next
month. Desbok likely was executed. Balin, banned as a collaborator from working
in the film industry for a year after the war, made only one more film.
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