Rating: 4/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 15/52 | Film Noir
The police have a map of The Casbah of Algiers on the wall. For the past two years, they have searched in vain for Pépé le Moko, an expert thief with a long list of burglaries and robberies. Parisian police don’t understand The Casbah—that it is like a labyrinth, with winding, narrow, and interconnecting streets. The cafés are dark and crowded, the population is far more extensive than those who designed the district intended, and the cafés are more multicultural than any Frenchman can fathom. It doesn’t help that the criminal networks in The Casbah protect Pépé as they do their own.
Meanwhile, Pépé tries to offload some recently stolen jewels when a busload of cops pour into the district, sending people into their homes to hide. Régis runs to Inès’s place, looking for Pépé to warn him. Inès hits the rooftops to reach Pépé. While everyone panics, Pépé keeps his cool and puts together a plan. Meanwhile, Régis tips off the police with the location Inès revealed to him. It turns out that isn’t where he is.
In the ensuing shootout, a Parisienne named Gaby finds herself hiding with Inspector Slimane. Pépé retreats over the rooftops and comes down to where Gaby and Slimane hide. Pépé instally falls for Gaby. Inspector Slimane has a personal rule that he’ll only pursue Pépé if he tries to flee The Casbah. But Slimane seems to know that date in his heart.
So, Pépé’s hiding spot also becomes his prison. With Régis aiding the police, Pépé’s partner Pierrot missing, and Pépé’s infatuation with Gaby, it seems like it’s only a matter of time for ol’ Pépé.
It’s hard to overstate the influence this movie had, not just on film but on culture. Following WWI, a cultural fatalism set in. The gangster in the film was a criminal whose comeuppance was our catharsis. But here, we have the cynical anti-hero who operates by his own rules, only softened by love, perhaps to his detriment. This is the birth of the cool. The lineage from this to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless is palpable. This film also operates as the prototype for the film noir, blending the striking contrasts of German Expressionism with poetic realism’s sense of disillusionment and applying them to the gangster flick.
The Casbah also became a cultural touchstone—no other film before or after has given this amount of attention to its layout and population, bringing it to life and helping this contemporary viewer understand the “exoticism” that Europeans, and later Americans, assigned it.
The sets are so gorgeous! I know they only filmed a little bit on location—nearly everything is shot in the studio. Some deftly placed matte paintings and, baby, you’ve got a setting. The filmmakers utilized a documentary shooting style when introducing The Casbah, dramatically enhancing the verisimilitude when revisiting those streets and places.
Jean Gabin has such a movie star demeanor—he seems to know that the camera just looking at him is enough to make him look cool. He also delivers his witty dialogue with the carelessness of a Harrison Ford. The dialogue was actually written separately from the screenplay because they wanted to make sure the dialogue popped, and sound was still a relatively new technology in film.
Renée Carl plays the most heartbreaking character — La mére Tarte, once a vaudeville singer but trapped in The Casbah and unable to meet someone who won’t beat her up. She lives in her past, and that past’s dreams that she will never fulfill. At this point, Carl had a prolific career in the silent era, staring in 185 movies before this one.
If nothing else, it’s just so thrilling to watch action-adventure movie troupes form before your eyes. But there’s also a disappointment in the deeply misogynist and cruel troupes that it reinforced and propagated for decades after.