104: Pepe Le Moko

FR  94m  Dir: Julian Duvivier  Key Cast: Jean Gabin

Most people won't have heard of Pepe le Moko but it has a sizeable pop culture legacy- it, or the American remake at least, inspired the writers of Casablanca and is the inspiration for the Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew.

The film makes the intriguing choice not to open with it's lead character. Instead we set a neat set-up of the premise as police officers discuss their failure to capture prolific burglar Pepe le Moko. There's a stunning piece of scene setting too as they describe the Casbah of Algiers, an old part of the city where Pepe hangs out making it very difficult to apprehend him. 

Pepe then comes on screen and is everything you imagine he will be- he's suave and likeable with a deeply dangerous side. Everyone in the Casbah both fears and respects him and he is highly attractive to women. The police force try various schemes to apprehend him but Inspector Slimane regularly meets Pepe in the streets and has a more subtle, drawn-out plan to apprehend Pepe involving using his love of women by introducing a glamourous Parisian. 

I thought this was exceptionally well made. They way the Casbah is introduced makes it really come alive on the screen and it's full of great characters. Even the bit parts feel like proper people with a past and feelings which few films really achieve. Pepe is a great lead, the sort of rogue who you know is despicable but kind of like at the same time, even though you know things aren't going to end well for him. 

It's really clear from the start of the film that the end will see Pepe arrested but the circumstances are less predictable. In actuality the ending becomes that of a tragic romance and as a viewer you gain a strange amount of sympathy towards a violent womanising jewel thief. 

Pepe le Moko is often described as one of the quintessential films in the "poetic realism" movement of the 1930s (indeed, other recent watches on this list also fit into that movement). It's not an easy movement to define but the idea is that it's a different sort of realism, a more aesthetic one, with an air of fatalism and nostalgia about them. There's a general atmosphere in the film that things were better in the past.

This is a rare film which from the outset is clearly fantastic and deserves to be more well know today.