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1937 French film??
Jun 05, 2013 11:53 AM 1099 Views
(Updated Jun 05, 2013 11:48 AM)

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From the air, the district known as Casbah looks like a teeming anthill, a vast staircase where terraces descend stepwise to the sea. Between these steps are dark winding streets like so many pitfalls. They intersect, overlap, twist in and out to form a jumble of mazes. Some are narrow, others vaulted. Wherever you look, stairways climb steep like ladders, or descend into dark putrid chasms and slimy porticos, dank and lice-infested. Dark, overcrowded cafes, silent empty streets with odd names- Inadequacy St, Soum Soum St, Honey hotel St, Man with a pearl St. A population of 40,000 in an area meant for 10,000. From all over the world. Many descended from the barbarians, are honest traditionalists but a mystery to us. Kabyles, Chinese, Gypsies, stateless, Slavs, Maltese, Negroes, Sicilians, Spaniards. And girls of all nations, shapes and sizes- the tall, the fat, the short, the ageless, the shapeless...chasms of fat no one would dare approach. The houses have inner courtyards which are like ceilingless cells that echo like wells and interconnect by means of terraces above.  They're the exclusive domain of native women, but Europeans are tolerated. They form a city apart, which step by step stretches down to the sea. Colourful, dynamic, multifaceted and boisterious -there's not one Casbah but hundreds. Thousands. And this teeming maze is what Pepe calls home.


So starts the formidably picturized beginning of Pepe Le Moko -employing dozens of shots and montages to bring to eye each of the words in the above paragraph. A team of policemen, in another expertly filmed scene, discuss the man they want to catch -Pepe Le Moko who's hiding out in the above-described Casbah. I watched this 1937 French film with the stellar help of excellent English subtitles provided by the Criterion collection, and realized that even in the 1930s, the French could outclass Hollywood.


Pepe (Jean Gabin), it quickly becomes clear, is an enigmatic criminal, wanted for a litany of transgressions. The camera when it first shows him tricks us into looking at someone lesser but we soon realize this is not the (anti)-hero. The lens eventually displays him holding a pearl in the oyster of his hand, clad fully in suit and tie, his light eyes flashing like the said gem. Pepe floats in a sea of relentlessly wonderful dialogue both within and around, hounded by treachery, and drawn magnetically to shifting romance and eventual fate. He never loses that sartorial armour of suit and tie- it's with him whether he is firing a gun,cradling a dying brother, holding a lady in his arms, or coolly snacking on a kabab off the streets.


Jean Gabin was a great star of French cinema, a war hero and he cared two hoots for playing nice for Hollywood. He was a prolific artiste and so was Julienne Duvuvier who directs this film with such focus and narrative fluidity that there is not a single weak sequence in this entire film.  The picture is also a great example of why black and white cinematography is such a strongly atmospheric device - colour would robbed this film's terrain of much of its quiddity. Henri La Barthe's novel and Henri Jeanson's terrific dialogues help to fuel the drama, romance and intrigue surrounding the hero. He appears to be in early middle-age, has been hiding out in the Casbah for two years, is rapidly growing sick of its medieval confines ("I'm like England,my future is on the waves") and actively angles for new love ("home is wherever he finds a woman","when he is dead there will be three thousand widows at his funeral").


There are repeated attempts and double-crosses from the get-go to capture Pepe, and he steadily loses interest in a gypsy lady Ines (Line Noro) who is deeply attached to him. Lucas Gridoux essays Inspector Slimane,a smooth-talking sly cop wearing a Tunisian chechia cap, and evokes another French specimen- Monsieur Lhereux from Madame Bovary. Pepe is unafraid to slap people, women included (it is interesting to see how such a lead character would have translated to the current day) and his hell-cares alpha-male character is trippily underlined in a a scene where he is thoroughly drunk, yet he lurches out on hearing a fight, wades into its midst, punches a man, and then comes back inside the bar. But when we think that he is most likely to hit a woman, he stops short and sobers down like a sage. Early in the story,when his woman makes a blunder, he looks at her and evenly says "I'm fond of you". "Why?"she asks.  "Because you are a child".


But this Paris-bred gangster gets eventually restless. Nonetheless, even under duress he separates the wheat from the chaff and proceeds to hatch a really neat plan. His dialogue from earlier in the story, regarding the ladies, then comes to mind - "I give them my body,but I keep my head". That is no doubt a good plan but it is not a perfect one. The heart is still in the body.


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