Julien Duvivier’s mysterious and passionately despairing 1937 movie is rereleased, with its luminous lead performance from Jean Gabin as a charismatic Parisian criminal hiding out in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers; he is protected there by the dense polyglot population of Indigenous locals that the French colonial authorities consider it imprudent to provoke. He is effectively given sanctuary, but also imprisoned in the unpoliceable, unknowable quarter that, like Polanski’s Chinatown, is a place that baffles and thwarts the imperial powers-that-be.
It was a film remade by Hollywood in 1938 as Algiers, which was the debut of Hedy Lamarr and made a huge star of its French lead Charles Boyer, who is much sleeker and more conventionally photogenic than Gabin (but forever stuck with the misquoted line: “Come with me to the Casbah…!” always being purred by nightclub comedians). Algiers in turn inspired Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, so these crooks, thieves, perspiring cynics and romantic stoics, all going slowly stir-crazy in the exotic, orientalised underbelly of north Africa, can all be traced back to Pépé le Moko. (Marcel Dalio, who played Casablanca’s croupier, is in Pépé le Moko as the slippery snitch L’Arbi.) It is a film of intense poetry; translated into the American context, the story looked noir-ish in ways that aren’t in the original.
