"Pepe Le Moko" (1937)

The Casbah in Pepe Le Moko is teeming with life. Every time we witness its labyrinth of narrow, winding pathways we see it filled with countless people going about their day-to-day lives, as if to say we are merely seeing one of what are surely countless stories. The film features numerous supporting characters, some even without names, not because they necessarily serve the plot but because they add to the richness of the environment (My favorite: the random dude playing cup-and-ball all the damn time). The portrayal attempts to convey just what life is like for a place intended for 10,000 people but instead containing 40,000. The Casbah was the native quarters under French occupation in Algeria, and its impenetrable maze of corridors and alleyways made it impossible for the French to maintain order of the place. When the government wants to arrest the titular notorious French criminal (Jean Gabin), hiding out in the Algerian quarters, they have to find ulterior ways to smoke him out. The Casbah is both a blessing and a curse for Pepe: it shields him from being taken away by the police but it also confines him. He’s gained power and position here, but that’s easy for someone as talented as him and helped along by people constantly being beat on by colonial forces. He once roamed the streets of Paris; even the clothes he wears mark him as different. He’s polished and put-together, scarcely a sign of dirt, but in his demeanor, how he carries himself, we see that he’s a cynical existential coil waiting to snap. Pepe Le Moko is sometimes described as “poetic realism”. Its style, grounded in reality but romantic and, at turns, lyrical, inspired the directors of the French New Wave. Its placement of the everyday side by side with some gangster poetry can be seen in the films of Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol. Though it is not of the noir era, the film has, if not a fatalism, a certain inevitability to it. The charming gangster is doomed to be smoked out, and due to two different women, no less. It is a softer and more hopeful than the full-blooded noir, but it is still pervaded with an existential chill under its warm surfaces.

Grade: B+