The fourth film in the 20-year collaboration between Julien Duvivier and Jean Gabin (after Golgotha, La bandera and La belle équipe), Pépé le Moko is one of the most important films both of 1930s poetic realism and French noir and is emblematic of the “mythology of defeat” which was one of the distinctive traits of the French variant of this genre. Its origins lay in a modest novel by Détective Ashelbé (alias of Henri La Barthe) in which Duvivier discovered an image that fascinated him: a man both protected and imprisoned by the Casbah. With its labyrinth of streets and alleys, its maze of confusing spaces which open onto terraces overlooking both port and city, the Casbah constitutes a purely cinematic ingredient, elevated to the status of co-protagonist. Most scenes were shot in the Joinville studios, where Jacques Krauss built his sets.
Shot with admirable virtuosity, the film begins with beautiful panoramas onto that fantastical, imaginary, labyrinthine Casbah and features an unusual number of shots from above and from below, all immersed in the deliberately artificial play of light and shadows of Jules Krüger’s cinematography, which is reminiscent of Expressionism. This is the fortress-kingdom of Pépé le Moko, a criminal exiled to Algeria, whom the young Gabin imbues with a charisma enriched and embellished by an unexpected weakness: a nostalgia for “his” Paris, dangerously reawakened by the presence of an intruder in the guise of the Parisian Gaby (Mireille Balin). A recurrent motif in Duvivier’s poetics is this nostalgia for another place and for an innocence that cannot be recaptured, while the threat of betrayal by friends and accomplices weighs heavily in the air. In Pépé le Moko, too, virtually every character is shifty and ambiguous – the relatively transparent allusions to the homosexuality of Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux) and his attraction to Pépé were daring for the times.
The film immediately became a huge hit with audiences, so much so that it resulted in two American remakes (one by John Cromwell in 1938 and another by John Berry in 1948) and two parodies (an American one in 1943, directed by Roy del Ruth and starring Zero Mostel, and an Italian one in 1949, directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia and starring Totò).

Roberto Chiesi