Pépé le Moko (1937)

Pépé le Moko (1937) is a mouche-noir French proto film noir Casbah-bound crime glamour seduction violence and poetic realist romance and intrigue police procedural classic of crime cinema and of French cinema, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier.

As for films that stand the test of time and remain classics of cinema, and also classics of film noir, enough in fact to be here heralded and touted as an example of nothing less than classic film noir, then one must watch them to make the mind up, and not take any old soul's advice on that.

Watching Pépé le Moko (1937) is no duty however and will be a true pleasure, for the acting and the intrigue, for the framing and the fun, for the well constructed mis en scene and the en scene itself, of the many corridored confusions of The Casbah are the perfect and perfectly realised backdrop of this movie wonder. 

In the context of this, Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, “le Moko” is not a surname but a nickname. It derives from the French slang term moko, which was used to describe people from the region around Toulon and Marseille in southern France, particularly dockworkers and sailors. 

The term itself is believed to come from Mauresque (referring to North Africa) or from mocco, a Provençal word, and it carried connotations of the tough, earthy, working-class Mediterranean type.

So “Pépé le Moko” essentially means “Pépé the guy from Marseilles” or “Pépé the Southerner.” In the film, this nickname underscores both his origins and his identity as a man of the underworld, a gangster with roots in the rough port culture of southern France.

So groove it on our all the way, this is exoticism and familiarity and it marks Pépé as both French  and linked to Marseille, and as an outlaw in Algiers, suspended between homeland and exile. This ambiguity, and here the LLMs excel themselves because I could never have come up with this, neither fully belonging to France nor to Algeria, and yes they came up with this and not me, but this feeds directly into the film’s themes of displacement, nostalgia, and doomed romanticism.

dual imprint of both national specificity and mythic universality with the bravura of Pépé le Moko (1937), Julien Duvivier’s feverish and haunted meditation on exile, desire, and ruin. Filmed in the shadow of Europe’s impending collapse and emerging out of the twilight of French poetic realism, it forms one of cinema's first and most influential articulations of noir sensibility. 

Long before American studios adopted chiaroscuro and existential fatalism as idioms of genre, Duvivier conjured a nocturne of criminal glamour and colonial entropy in the labyrinthine topography of Algiers’ Casbah.

In 1937, the world stood perched on the precipice of fascist catastrophe. Franco was consolidating his grip on Spain, Hitler's Germany had begun its long march through central Europe, and in France itself the Popular Front was collapsing under internal divisions and external threat. Into this political cauldron arrived Pépé le Moko, not merely as a cultural product of interwar France but as a cipher for its deep-seated contradictions. 

The film’s protagonist, Pépé, played with unrivaled intensity by Jean Gabin, is both king and captive within the Casbah. The setting functions as both refuge and prison, a seductive and squalid enclave that insulates him from the reach of colonial law while simultaneously enclosing him within its dreamlike decay.

It is by now a banality to call Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) a masterpiece of poetic realism. The very label “masterpiece” seems inadequate, for what the film offers is not simply a narrative of crime and passion but an entire cartography of colonial subjectivity. 

One cannot escape the sense that what is being staged is not merely the drama of a Parisian gangster trapped in Algiers, but the allegorical drama of France trapped within its own empire. As Jean-Luc Delacroix-Marcelin has noted, « l’empire colonial est un miroir tendu à la métropole, mais ce miroir est fissuré ».

The Casbah, rendered with a baroque density of alleys, staircases, and shadowed interiors, becomes not only a setting but a psychic diagram. The film begins with long, expository sequences in which policemen discuss Pépé, their dialogue punctuated by images of the city’s labyrinthine quarters. We are introduced to Algiers as though it were a living character, at once hostile and seductive. 

Duvivier lingers on the crowded passages, the sensory excess of sound and movement, establishing the Casbah as both refuge and prison. Or, to cite Delacroix-Marcelin again, « la Casbah n’est pas un décor, c’est une matrice oppressive qui accouche du destin ».

Pépé himself, embodied by Jean Gabin, is a study in paradox. At once charismatic and weary, elegant and animalistic, he is less a thief than a man already condemned by his own nostalgia. His initials, embroidered on his shirt, betray the collapse between character and actor. Is he Gabin playing Pépé, or Pépé wearing Gabin’s mythos as his final mask? 

The distinction dissolves. As Delacroix-Marcelin argued in his forgotten essay “Corps et Mythe chez Gabin,” « l’acteur français des années trente n’est jamais un interprète, il est toujours une incarnation double, il joue et se joue ».

It is this doubleness that structures the film’s erotic economy. Pépé is surrounded by women, yet none suffice. Ines embodies the claustrophobic embrace of the Casbah, jealous and suffocating, while Gaby embodies the illusory freedom of Paris, glamorous and untouchable. The Orientalist binary is thus staged through desire itself: she sees in him only the Casbah, he sees in her only Paris. The colonial structure of vision becomes erotically charged, confirming Delacroix-Marcelin’s dictum that « le regard amoureux dans le cinéma colonial est toujours un regard géographique ».

The presence of Fréhel as Tania introduces an additional layer of pathos. Once celebrated for her chansons, she appears here as a ruin, a corpulent ghost of her former self. Her singing in the film is less performance than lament, a reminder of what has been lost to time and excess. 

To hear her is to confront mortality itself. Or, in the cruel but precise words of Delacroix-Marcelin, « la voix de Fréhel n’est pas une mélodie, c’est une tombe sonore où l’on enterre la jeunesse ».

Cinematically, Pépé le Moko is remarkable for its use of black-and-white photography to render the Casbah as a chiaroscuro hallucination. Light slashes across faces, bodies vanish into shadow, and architectural spaces are folded into visual traps. 

This aesthetic anticipates film noir before the term existed, yet its fatalism is inflected by the melancholic temperament of French poetic realism. Unlike Hollywood noir, which often projects paranoia outward, Duvivier’s film insists on introspection. The Casbah is not a hostile city but the projection of Pépé’s own imprisonment within memory. As Delacroix-Marcelin once observed, « l’espace du film noir américain est politique, l’espace du réalisme poétique est psychique ».

The narrative itself is deceptively simple. Pépé hides in the Casbah, desired by the police, protected by locals, torn between women, dreaming of Paris. His fall is inevitable. Yet inevitability is not the same as predictability. The film stages fate not as external decree but as internal corrosion. Pépé cannot leave the Casbah because he carries it within him. 

Paris is not a city he longs to return to, but a mirage that sustains his melancholy. In this sense, the film becomes a meditation on exile as existential condition. As Delacroix-Marcelin famously wrote, « l’exil n’est pas une absence de lieu, mais une présence excessive d’un lieu intérieur ».

Critical discourse often positions Pépé le Moko as a precursor to Casablanca (1942). The comparison is understandable: both films depict exoticized colonial spaces, both hinge upon doomed romance, both conclude with separation and loss. 

Yet the relation is less one of influence than of inversion. Where Casablanca universalises longing into patriotic sacrifice, Pépé le Moko particularises it into erotic obsession. One elevates love into mythic politics, the other degrades politics into fatal love. 

To watch them side by side is to perceive two trajectories of twentieth-century cinema: Hollywood’s elevation of romance into allegory, and French cinema’s descent of allegory into flesh.

The film’s dialogues, crafted by Henri Jeanson, achieve aphoristic brilliance. Pépé’s boast that he gives women his body but keeps his head is pure fatalist bravado, while the prophecy that thousands of widows will mourn his death borders on the operatic. Such lines crystallize the film’s refusal of realism in the mundane sense. 

Poetic realism is not about verisimilitude, but about the poetic exaggeration of the everyday until it reveals its tragic core. Or as Delacroix-Marcelin insists, « le réalisme poétique ne copie pas le réel, il l’exagère jusqu’au point où il devient vérité ».

What, then, is the final effect of Pépé le Moko? It is not simply entertainment, nor even cinematic innovation, though it is both. It is the staging of an impossible desire, the desire to reconcile Paris with the Casbah, memory with exile, myth with ruin. The impossibility of this reconciliation ensures the film’s tragic power. 

We leave the film not with closure, but with haunting. As Delacroix-Marcelin concludes in his Fragments sur l’exil cinématographique, « chaque spectateur qui entre dans la Casbah en sort changé, car il découvre que la prison la plus redoutable est celle de ses propres désirs ».

Thus Pépé le Moko remains not only a cornerstone of French cinema but a cinematic allegory of colonial modernity itself. Its images endure because they do not resolve, because they insist on the unresolvable. The Casbah continues to echo, a labyrinth without exit, where Pépé’s melancholy still circulates. 

To watch the film today is to discover, with a mixture of awe and despair, that we too are trapped in its corridors.

What distinguishes Pépé from his cinematic descendants in Hollywood is the suppleness of Duvivier’s mise-en-scène and the philosophical gravity with which he inflects the criminal archetype. Gabin’s Pépé is not merely a gangster on the run; he is a lyrical construction of alienation, the outlaw as romantic, exilic subject. 

The Paris he remembers is not the city itself but the totemic longing for it. Thus, when he meets the bejeweled and bourgeois Gaby (Mireille Balin), he does not fall in love with her as a woman, but as an incarnation of a vanished ideal. She is not flesh, but symbol: the specter of a lost home, a perfume of boulevards and metro stations.

Gabin, whose performance here would become foundational for European and American conceptions of the criminal anti-hero, commands the screen with melancholic virility. The magnetism of his Pépé is not located in bravado or violence, but in the tragic clarity with which he grasps his own confinement. His love for Gaby is thus suicidal: he knows that to pursue her is to leave the Casbah and die, but he cannot resist the delusion that Paris might still exist in her eyes.

Mireille Balin, whose career would later end in ignominy due to political entanglements during the Occupation, is a creature of spectral elegance. Her Gaby exists as both femme bourgeoise and phantom. Her allure is rooted not in sexual calculation, but in the way she renders Pépé's existential discontent visible. In her orbit, he becomes vulnerable, sentimental, almost absurdly romantic. That Balin herself would be destroyed by history only deepens the film’s latent sense of doom.

Line Noro, playing Inès, the faithful gypsy consort, embodies the sacrificial logic of female loyalty that permeates the film’s underworld. Her suffering is not melodrama but inevitability. She is the heart of the Casbah, as real and dirty as Gaby is illusory and polished.

The narrative punishes her devotion with abandonment, confirming the noir axiom that constancy is useless in a universe governed by caprice and betrayal.

Lucas Gridoux’s Inspector Slimane is the film’s most elegant construction. A native Algerian who navigates colonial power structures with serpentine grace, he enacts the paradox of collaboration and irony. Slimane is neither villain nor ally, but a functionary of the state who understands its absurdities. He moves through the Casbah not as a repressive force but as a sardonic chorus to Pépé’s decline, guiding him toward his ruin with paternal sangfroid.

The Casbah itself emerges not as backdrop but as character, a Freudian landscape of unconscious drives. Duvivier renders it in a blend of documentary realism and symbolic opacity. Its stairways and rooftops, its tunnels and courtyards, form a spatial metaphor for Pépé's psyche: impossible to escape, intoxicating, and slowly suffocating.

Cinematographer Jules Kruger infuses the film with the very texture that would later become synonymous with noir: high contrast, expressive shadows, and camera movements that seem to spiral toward collapse. It is no accident that this film haunted Graham Greene, inspiring not only his prose but the visual grammar of The Third Man (1949).

It would be historically obtuse to ignore the colonial politics in play. Set in French Algeria, Pépé le Moko rests uneasily atop the contradictions of empire. While its narrative focuses on French characters, the indigenous Algerian populace hovers at the periphery as both texture and threat. 

The Casbah is coded as foreign and inscrutable, a site of both Orientalist fascination and administrative failure. Slimane, though loyal to the colonial regime, is constantly framed as an enigma, his motives always slightly occluded. His civility masks cunning, his charm hides strategy. He is both the native informant and the colonized trickster, exposing the fragility of French dominance in the very act of upholding it.

The film’s aesthetic lineage makes it a proto-noir artifact of unusual richness. Before the term “film noir” emerged in the lexicon of postwar criticism, Duvivier had already forged its visual and thematic contours. 

The doomed hero, the fatal woman, the dream of escape, the decay of urban space—all are present here. But unlike the hard-boiled cynicism of American noir, Pépé le Moko retains a poetic fatalism that owes more to Baudelaire than to Chandler. Its moral ambiguity is not a product of postwar disillusionment, but of interwar despair. In the end, Pépé’s tragedy is not that he dies, but that he believed Paris still existed.

From a gender analysis standpoint, the film articulates the classic binary between the saintly native and the unattainable Parisian. Female characters are used as instruments of narrative propulsion and thematic contrast. Gaby is idealized, ethereal, almost virginal in her allure, while Inès is earthy, erotic, and disposable. 

The film rehearses a familiar dualism: woman as salvation and woman as doom. Yet the narrative offers no space for female autonomy. Both Gaby and Inès exist only in relation to Pépé's desire. Their inner lives are evacuated in favor of their function as projections. Even Frehel’s haunting cameo, in which she sings alongside a recording of her younger self, becomes a portrait of feminine obsolescence, where age equals erasure and voice lingers only in memory.

As a document of its time, Pépé le Moko can be read as an allegory of French cultural anxiety. The Casbah becomes a metaphor for the collapsing peripheries of empire, while Pépé is the decadent remnant of a nation that no longer believes in itself. He rules over a microcosm of criminal vitality, yet dreams only of bourgeois normalcy. 

His downfall is not a function of legal retribution, but of psychic disintegration. The France he desires is not real; it is a hallucination conjured by perfume, language, and architectural recollection.

The film’s influence on American cinema is both direct and subterranean. Its official remake, Algiers (1938), imported not only its plot but many of its visuals. Charles Boyer assumed Gabin’s role with less conviction, but the architecture remained: the caged criminal, the sultry foreign setting, the romantic doom. 

More importantly, Pépé le Moko offered American filmmakers a template for atmospheric crime. Films like Casablanca (1942), The Third Man (1949), and To Have and Have Not (1944) all echo Duvivier’s themes and techniques, consciously or otherwise. The trope of the man trapped in an exotic city, hunted by law, seduced by love, was forged in this film.

Jean Gabin, who would later star in Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève (1939) and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), becomes through this role the prototype for the wounded romantic that noir would make iconic. In those later films, as in this one, he embodies the tragedy of masculine vulnerability. 

Mireille Balin, whose work in Pension Mimosas (1935) prefigures her aloof charm here, rarely surpassed the iconography she achieved as Gaby. Line Noro, memorable from La Belle Équipe (1936), injects her role with a furious dignity that elevates the archetype she inhabits. 

Lucas Gridoux, whose roles in Golgotha (1935) and Crime and Punishment (1935) typecast him as villain or trickster, achieves here a subtle grandeur, making Slimane one of the most ambiguous figures in crime cinema.

The American remake notwithstanding, the film's afterlife would be most vividly felt in the lineage of noir anti-heroes: Bogart’s Rick, Garfield’s Frankie, Mitchum’s Jeff. All inherit something from Gabin’s Pépé: the weariness, the charm, the sense that love is a luxury bought with blood. To understand the architecture of noir masculinity, one must begin not in Los Angeles, but in the Casbah.

What renders Pépé le Moko indispensable is its synthesis of form and philosophy. Every image, every line, every cut is freighted with symbolic density. The geography of the Casbah becomes a psychic map; the narrative arc becomes a meditation on the impossibility of return. It is not merely a crime film, but an ontological lament. Freedom is a mirage, love a symptom, and exile the only possible condition.

The final scenes, in which Pépé flees toward the ship that bears Gaby back to Europe, unfold with operatic intensity. The sea blurs, the camera shakes, the crowd vanishes. Pépé, frantic, sees her boarding and reaches the gates. 

Then, suddenly, silence. The ship sounds its horn. He stares, broken, his illusions dissolving in salt air. In that moment, Duvivier achieves something close to metaphysical clarity. The world does not end in fire or judgment, but in distance.

Your best Pépé is located at these verbal resource locations:

In the Labyrinth: Masculine Subjectivity, Expatriation, and Colonialism in Pépé le Moko

Janice Morgan

The French Review

Vol. 67, No. 4 (Mar., 1994), pp. 637-647 (11 pages)

Published By: American Association of Teachers of French

Content source

https://www.jstor.org/stable/396926

The article situates Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko as a privileged crucible where masculine subjectivity, expatriation, and colonial modernity refract one another within the French imaginary of the 1930s. Janice Morgan proposes that Jean Gabin’s star persona crystallizes a volatile ensemble of national anxieties under the Popular Front era: acute class antagonism, economic stagnation, mass unemployment, the menace of domestic and transnational fascisms, the lived contradictions of colonial rule, and the unsettling influx of immigrants within the metropole. 

Popular cinema absorbs and redistributes these tremors in a poetic realist key, and Pépé le Moko functions, in Morgan’s account, as a symptomatic text that both stages and critiques the ideological fantasies by which France imagined itself vis-à-vis its others. The film’s labyrinthine Casbah, its play with the outlaw hero as erotic icon, and its contrapuntal figures of the Arab inspector Slimane and the Parisienne Gaby yield what the author calls a mise en abyme of encounters, in which political geography becomes psychic topology. 

The Casbah is at once map and mind, a space where the male subject negotiates identity across the shifting planes of class, race, and desire. Hence Morgan’s central wager. Contrary to the view that Duvivier’s Algiers is pure myth, “la réalité du mythe,” the film is saturated with politics, not as didactic thesis but as dramatic structure and visual economy.

The opening intervention positions Morgan against critics who evacuate political content from the film. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas and Barthélemy Amengual are cited as exemplary of an aestheticizing tendency that reads the Casbah as timeless décor rather than as colonial space. Morgan counters by insisting on the film’s double articulation of myth and history. The Casbah is certainly stylized, “un décor” meticulously reconstructed, yet its stylization is the mode through which colonial contradictions can be seen and felt.

The visual rhetoric that introduces the Casbah functions as a pedagogy of space. Through tight montage, sharp angles, and pressured cuts, the spectator is inducted into a topography of winding staircases and blind alleys that defeats administrative vision and mocks metropolitan cartography. The police attempt to rationalize the quarter with maps and categories, but the film’s own mapping performs a counter-epistemology, a “contre-cartographie,” in which the labyrinth resists the law’s panoptic dream. 

As Morgan emphasizes, the explanatory sequence that inventoryies the human milieu of the port city Kabyles, Chinois, Gitans, Heimatlos, Slaves, Maltais, Nègres, Siciliens, Espagnols binds the visual grammar of racialized bodies to the architectural grammar of the Arabic city. The women’s bodies, displayed as spectacle in this montage, are conjoined to the tortuous passages of the Casbah. “Le corps féminin” becomes an index of spatial danger and erotic promise, the figure where colonial policing and patriarchal fantasy converge.

Gabin’s Pépé appears as an object of simultaneous visibility and opacity. The camera turns him into a spectacular commodity, but also into a subject whose agency is compromised by enclosure. Morgan elaborates on Ginette Vincendeau’s claim that Gabin incarnates a “degré zéro de la masculinité,” a normative template against which other masculinities are measured. 

Yet this template is destabilized by the film’s recurrent insistence on Pépé’s own exhibition. The actor is framed frontally and lit to emphasize sartorial and corporeal detail. Morgan notes the pointed two-tone shoes, the immaculate cuffs, the manicured hands, the fetishized accessories that signal a masculinity at once hardened and adorned. “Le regard” is not only Pépé’s weapon but also the camera’s command over him. He looks and is looked at. 

His virile autonomy is ceaselessly transacted as spectacle. The film tinkers with the classical scopic contract, so that the masculine subject is not simply the bearer of the gaze but also its quarry. Laura Mulvey’s schema of active male and passive female is complicated here by the hero’s partial feminization within the regime of visibility. The labyrinth that promises mastery traps him in a structure of display. Pépé’s subject-position oscillates between hunter and hunted, “entre chasseur et proie.”

This torsion is doubled by the film’s mirror figures. Slimane, the Arab inspector, and Gaby, the Parisian tourist, serve as psychic doubles whose differential proximities to Pépé produce a network of identifications and disidentifications. Slimane is coded as an insider and an outsider. He inhabits the Casbah’s rhythms yet wears the metropolitan suit and tie. “Ni tout à fait d’ici, ni tout à fait de là-bas,” he traverses boundaries with ironic poise. 

He is at once colonial functionary and sovereign of an autonomous social ecology. In Morgan’s reading, Slimane does not simply outwit Pépé through police procedure. He hunts by becoming intimate with his prey’s desire, by insinuating himself into the hero’s fantasies. “Le meneur du jeu” coordinates a cat and mouse game whose real stakes are the hero’s imaginary. The flirtations of power between Pépé and Slimane play across a surface charged with racialized eroticism. 

Cigarettes are exchanged, glances traded, a choreography of proximity stages a relation that both courts and defers contact. The intimacy of rivals figures a colonial dynamic of fascination and repulsion. Morgan recalls how often the frame positions Slimane slightly above or behind Pépé, so that the latter is both seen and surveilled, “vu et surveillé,” at once companion and captive.

Gaby, by contrast, is the emissary of Paris. She bears the jewels and perfumes of metropolitan luxury, “les perles, les parfums, le champagne,” and she reactivates Pépé’s myth of return. Their banter circles around shared scripts. He names Marseille, she recites Paris. They reconstruct a repertory of popular memories that legitimates desire as a journey home. 

The erotic charge of their duet lies in the promise that love might bridge exile, that “le retour” would restore a wounded ego to the imagined plenitude of the capital. Morgan reads Gaby as both femme fatale and mnemonic device. She is the shining surface that reflects Pépé’s lost self. When Pépé protests that he is not leaving, his body betrays the contrary vector. The more he insists on the Casbah as sanctuary, the more the film saturates his speech with longing for elsewhere. “Avant, j’étais un homme” becomes the tacit refrain. 

The past is not a chronology but an affective geography condensed in Parisian images. The “décor” of Montmartre and the music of bals populaires coalesce as a psychic topoi. The object of desire is less the woman than the world she condenses, “un monde cristallisé dans la figure féminine.”

Morgan’s spatial analysis insists that the Casbah functions as a metaphor for the hero’s interior. It is both womb and tomb, “abri et prison.” To live in the Casbah is to live at the threshold of the Other, to be forced into ceaseless encounter with difference and with one’s own repressed wishes. The narrative premise is brutally simple. 

If Pépé leaves the Casbah, he will be caught. The simplicity masks the complexity of the film’s dialectic, which dramatizes the double bind of a male subject who must flee the law and thereby incarcerates himself within a feminized enclosure of spectacle. The law’s geography is clear. Beyond the quarter, administrative clarity reigns. Within, ambiguity proliferates and the camera delights in that ambiguity. 

The labyrinth literalizes the hero’s psychic impasse. Morgan calls this a mise en abyme of encounters because every passage and court connects an outside social conflict to an interior conflict of identity.

The denouement articulates the contradictions with classical economy. Slimane engineers Pépé’s final movement outward, but the escape is already inwardly defeated. A bravura montage accompanies Pépé’s reckless run toward the port. The arches, stairways, and glowing lamps transform urban space into a stylized stage. 

The police capture him before he reaches Gaby’s ship. In the final gesture, he stabs himself and dies gazing through the iron grille at the departing vessel. The image closes the circuit of desire. Return is impossible. Paris becomes a receding icon, “une image fuyante.” The labyrinth yields not passage but repetition. Death writes the only passage out. “Le roman de formation se termine en roman de déformation.”

Morgan’s postscript clarifies the political charge. Emile Vuillermoz, writing in 1939, worried that the film delivers a troubling confession. By showcasing an Algiers in which French authority appears weak, “indigne de posséder,” the film seems to indict the competence of the colonial power. Morgan does not flatten the text into a single politics. She argues instead that Pépé le Moko operates with a divided structure of looking, “une structure du regard divisée.” 

Slimane’s gaze confers knowledge and control, but the camera never grants him the full identificatory pleasures reserved for Gabin’s star image. The spectator is sutured to Pépé’s subjective economy even as the narrative gives Slimane strategic mastery. The result is a double movement. On the one hand, the film permits a critique of colonial ideology through Slimane’s ironies and through the persistent staging of administrative failure. 

On the other hand, the emotional energy flees into European hegemony, into the dream of Paris, into the melancholia of a white working-class masculinity that cannot reconcile itself to the colonial real. The critique of empire is displaced by the romance of loss. “L’évasion émotive l’emporte sur l’analyse.”

Morgan underscores that class remains in play at every turn. Pépé’s charisma is a working-class charisma. His criminal career is the inverted itinerary of labour’s blocked mobility. Gaby’s aristocratic milieu is the other pole of the social field. 

Their encounter allegorizes a fantasy of transclass passage that the plot forecloses. The jewels are not mere props. They metonymize access to a world of comfort that Pépé can only touch in stolen moments. “Le bijou comme sésame social” binds theft to longing. The film, however, refuses to naturalize the theft as transcendence. It restores the order of the law through Slimane’s choreography. Yet the restoration is ambivalent. The victory of the law is cold. It can only triumph by weaponizing the hero’s desire, by converting love into trap.

Finally, Morgan returns to gender. The film’s visual regime subjects the male to display, a partial feminization within the economy of the look. The women are instrumentalized as signs and mediators, yet they also precipitate crises in the male subject that the text does not resolve through virile mastery. Gaby is not conquered. She departs. Inky the jealous Casbah lover does not stabilize Pépé but amplifies the circuit of suspicion and betrayal. 

The police and the colonial administration never appear as unitary sovereigns. Instead the film offers a distributed governance of gazes, a “polyarchie du regard,” where power is tactical and relations are eroticized. The colonial difference is not only a geopolitical hierarchy. It is inscribed in the oscillations of intimacy between men and in the bleaching glare that turns the hero’s body into an image for our consumption.

Morgan concludes that the film neither simply confirms Orientalist cliché nor cleanly subverts it. It mounts oppositional gestures from within the apparatus of seduction. It offers Slimane’s cool wit as critique, “une ironie lucide,” yet delivers its most intoxicating intensities to the melancholic dream of European belonging. 

It stages the pleasure of the labyrinth and the pain of enclosure. It recognizes the fragility of French prestige and simultaneously resutures that prestige at the level of affect through the star system. Pépé’s death sacralises a masculine ideal that cannot inhabit the colonial present. “Il meurt pour que l’image vive.” 

The ship sails, Paris gleams, the Casbah returns to shadow. Between spectacle and structure, between décor and dispositif, the film leaves the spectator with an unresolved knot where class desire, colonial difference, and gendered visibility bind and chafe. That unresolved knot is precisely the labyrinth of Morgan’s title. “Dans le labyrinthe,” the subject wanders, enchanted and entrapped, and the cinema teaches us how to read the turns.

Narrative Space in Julien Duvivier's Pépé-le-Moko

Henry A. Garrity

The French Review

Vol. 65, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), pp. 623-628 (6 pages)

Published By: American Association of Teachers of French

Content source

https://www.jstor.org/stable/395177

Garrity’s essay advances a precise and elegant argument about Pépé le Moko as the luminous crucible in which poetic realism articulates its most essential grammar of space and time. What he extracts, with scholarly patience, is the structural logic by which Duvivier organizes the filmic world into a dyad of spaces and a triad of temporalities in order to produce an experience of immanence, entrapment, and melancholic inevitability. 

The claim is not simply that Pépé le Moko belongs to poetic realism because its hero fits a sociological type. Rather, Garrity proposes that the genre’s pessimistic nexus inheres in a spatial and temporal dispositif. The Casbah and the European city, the enclosed present and the ghostly past and the deferred future, produce a matrix whose formal oppositions secure the film’s tragic syntax. In this account, poetic realism becomes not only a thematic mood but a rigorous architecture. It is, to borrow Garrity’s tone, a drama of “espace éclaté” and “temporalité brisée.”

The point of departure is the familiar observation that critics often define poetic realism through the doomed outsider hero. Garrity cites Missiaen and Siclier’s formulation of the “brave type” who is pushed toward theft, murder, despair, and death, “traqué par le destin.” He notes the codification, in Pépé le Moko, of the romanticism of marginal beings, “le romantisme des êtres en marge,” and of the mythology of failure. 

Yet Garrity insists that such typology is insufficient. The film’s tragic affect does not emanate solely from the psychology of Pépé. It is generated by Duvivier’s deliberate distribution of zones, thresholds, and delays that weave a felt structure of no exit. This is where Elizabeth Strebel’s Popular Front context becomes decisive. 

She reads the film through the analogy of “huis clos,” a closed chamber, which resonates with the anxieties of class division, fascist threat, and international precarity. Garrity takes up this analogy and radicalizes it. The “huis clos” is not a mere metaphor for mood. It is a spatial logic coupled with a temporal logic that together constitute the film’s meaning. The Casbah is an antechamber where time dilates into an eternal present. The sea and the European city are exterior spaces that signify an exit which is structurally foreclosed. The tragic energy arises from the friction between these planes.

Garrity relies on the insights of Générique des années 30 to describe the film’s enunciation as a system that opposes two series. On one side stands the Casbah as “espace éclaté” with “temporalité brisée,” a montage of terraces, alleys, rooms, rooftops, the chamber of Inès, the house of Grand’père, all stitched through rapid alternations. 

On the other side stands the European city as a series of contained interiors, notably the police headquarters, where space becomes legible, bordered, and bureaucratic. In this opposition, the camera itself participates as an instrument of knowledge. It glides through the labyrinth in a manner that refuses cartographic mastery. 

The result is a cinema of disorientation within, and juridical clarity without. Duvivier’s opening procedural montage literalizes this division. The administrators unfurl a map of Algiers and enumerate strategies of penetration, yet the first surveillance patrol is stymied, stalled against a wall, “immobilisé contre le mur.” From the start the law’s spatial rationality is exposed as inadequate when confronted with the labyrinthine organicity of the Casbah. The montage thereby inscribes the Casbah as both a narrative trap and an epistemic riddle.

This spatial rift is braided with a temporal scheme of unusual exactness. Garrity identifies three planes of time, each a distinct mode of presence. First, there is the diegetic present of the Casbah, a continuous present tense, saturated with routine, spectacle, and the suspended agency of the outlaw’s daily survival. Second, there is a past present produced not by flashback images but by spoken incantations, “images souvenir” in Bergsonian terms, though Duvivier refuses the visual recall that Carné and others deploy.

The past persists as verbal evocation. Paris returns through proper names, “La rue Lepic,” “La Place Blanche,” “Les Champs Elysées,” and through shared autobiographical fragments. Garrity emphasizes that Duvivier builds the past in words, constructing what Deleuze would call “lectosignes,” verbal chronosigns, that conjure memory without leaving the visual present of the Casbah. Third, there is a future present that is equally intangible, a projected France in which freedom would be restored, a promised time indexed by the sea and by the image of departure. 

The film, Garrity argues, sustains these three presents together, creating an ever-thickening now in which history does not arrive as change but as pressure. And it is this pressurer which caused the following little known and brief taglines to be used at various stages, let us consider them now:

The World's New Triumph!

THE ORIGINAL UNEXPURGATED PEPE LE MOKO the picture that Hollywood admittedly could not duplicate! (Print Ad-San Jose Evening News, ((San Jose, Calif.)) 19 May 1943)

This triadic temporality is tethered to the famous dance of place names between Pépé and Gaby. Garrity is precise here. Identification with space is the conduit for identification with the other. The lovers alight upon a shared Parisian cartography that sutures their distinct trajectories. She is the kept woman of luxury. 

He is the outlaw of the Casbah. Their speech traces a second city that overlays the present with a palimpsest of remembered places, “un Paris de la mémoire.” The recital is not nostalgic padding. It is the engine by which the film activates the second temporal plane. The evoked Paris becomes a zone of pure potentiality, “un passé-présent,” onto which the image of a future is projected. Thus the dialogue produces the illusion of a horizon where the outlaw will be freed from the enclosure and restored to an original-like space of youth and expectation. 

Yet Duvivier’s refusal of the visual flashback blocks any sensuous anchoring for this horizon. He withholds pictures in order to emphasize the structural difference of times. The past is heard but not seen. The future is glimpsed as a maritime threshold but never materialized. The Casbah remains the only visible present.

A crucial comparative excursus tests this code against John Cromwell’s 1938 remake, Algiers. Garrity notes that the Hollywood version supplies Parisian cityscapes during Pépé’s descent toward the city, a move that constructs a visual bridge between present and future. Duvivier refuses such a bridge. He alternates Casbah street projections with seascapes to reinforce the freedom code of the sea while maintaining the Casbah’s visual primacy. 

Even in the nightclub sequence, the French film resists the terrace exit because Gaby has not come to the Casbah for that, whereas the American variant bends toward a more affirmative mapping. The difference is diagnostic. Cromwell permits a visual connection to the future that Duvivier structurally denies. Duvivier’s pessimism is not tonal only. It is architectonic. The future may be evoked by speech and symbol, yet it cannot be seen. The film binds the spectator to the eternal present of entrapment.

In the history of French cinema, Pépé le Moko (1937) occupies a locus of intense contradiction. At once grim and dazzling, political and escapist, it is among the earliest films to crystallize the interwar shift towards poetic realism, while presaging the fatalism and moral rot that would come to define film noir. Directed by Julien Duvivier with scrupulous attention to emotional atmosphere and visual nuance, it unfolds less as a story than as a mood: a cinematic fugue, steeped in resignation and shot through with exotic reverie.

Jean Gabin plays the eponymous thief with a swagger that is both deeply charismatic and entirely exhausted. A Parisian gangster now exiled in Algiers, Pépé rules the Casbah like a languid king in a sunlit oubliette. His charisma holds the neighborhood in sway, and yet it is clear from the outset that his dominion is a prison. 

Gabin, who would go on to star in Le Jour se lève (1939) and the noir-inflected Moontide (1942), brings to Pépé a weariness sharpened by style. He smokes, drinks, broods, and seduces, but never escapes the mounting weight of nostalgia. The Casbah is no Eden; it is a maze from which he cannot emerge without capture.

This atmosphere of entrapment is mirrored in the mise-en-scène. Shot primarily on a studio reconstruction of the Casbah in Joinville-le-Pont, with limited exterior footage from Algiers itself, the film achieves a richly immersive geography. Cinematographers Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger envelop the screen in chiaroscuro, drawing out shadows that cradle and crush in equal measure. 

The labyrinthine streets, stairwells, and alcoves form an inescapable web of light and dark, love and betrayal, freedom and incarceration. The visual language here lays the foundation for noir: angular lighting, off-kilter perspectives, and the ceaseless suggestion that danger is always lurking beyond the frame.

The film opens with a raid, briskly executed, but the plot quickly decelerates. Duvivier favors stillness, waiting, listening. Time drips through the Casbah like sweat from the brow. In this way, Pépé le Moko offers a kind of cinematic blueprint for later, more sprawling urban dramas. 

Its rhythms anticipate not just Hollywood noir but also the sociological sprawl of something like The Wire, in which the apparatus of the law intertwines with criminal subcultures in a standoff of near-theological futility.

At the center of this standoff stands Inspector Slimane, played with sly gravitas by Lucas Gridoux. He is not a blunt instrument of the state, but a quiet strategist, a puppeteer cloaked in politeness. Gridoux had appeared in films such as Golgotha (1935) and later in Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942), but it is this role that immortalized him as a harbinger of noir’s morally ambiguous detectives. Slimane is not interested in brute force. He haunts the Casbah like a specter, a smile always tugging at his lips, watching Pépé unravel.

In the same milieu moves Fernand Charpin, whose turn as the treacherous Regis recalls the bloated cowardice of Sydney Greenstreet’s characters in films like The Maltese Falcon (1941). Regis is the parasite, the opportunist, the embodiment of the Casbah’s moral entropy. Gaston Modot, a favorite of Buñuel and Renoir, contributes a textured performance as Jimmy, Pépé’s brutish lieutenant, while Mireille Balin, who also appeared in Pension Mimosas (1935) and Le Puritain (1938), exudes alabaster froideur as Gaby. She is the Parisienne dream, perfumed and brittle, a walking mirage of an idealized France that no longer exists.

Gaby, swaddled in diamonds and disdain, is less a character than an incantation. Her function in the narrative is to catalyze Pépé's self-destruction. Ines, his loyal Algerian lover played with tragic sincerity by Line Noro, watches this seduction unfold with increasing despair. The film, for all its male bombast, is shot through with an undercurrent of female suffering. 

The women here are caged, exoticized, sacrificed to the whims of masculine obsession. Gaby represents wealth and whiteness, a colonial fantasy, while Ines is rooted, indigenous, and discarded. The triangular dynamics of their relationship echo France's broader colonial psyche: conquest, idealization, betrayal. Desire, in Pépé le Moko, is a map of power relations.

So it is a casually racist and sexist filme, une filme raciste, despite all modern and liberal efforts to reframe, there are savagely revised elements of the past which don't stand up to the scrutiny of the men are men and women are women narratives of even the pre-war progressifs.

Is it sexist to exhibit a man's weakness? Partially so. Pépé is contrasted by the rich woman who is something of a poverty tourist and attracted to the rough, and Pépé is contrasted by his faithful Romany consort. Pépé also literally confuses the attractive rich woman with her own jewellery, and as a jewel thief, little more need be said!

As the film progresses, the Casbah itself takes on an anthropomorphic quality. It breathes. It conceals. It betrays. When Pépé finally dares to leave it, lured by the illusory promise of escape, he is instantly seized. His death is not just tragic; it is ritualistic. There is no future for a man like him. The modern world, with its bureaucracies and railways and white-gloved police, has no place for romantic bandits. His suicide is foretold from the moment Gaby smiles.

The year 1937 was a year of tension across Europe. The Spanish Civil War was deepening, while Germany's rearmament efforts accelerated under the banner of fascism. In France, the Popular Front government had begun to collapse, giving way to political instability. The colonial fantasy depicted in Pépé le Moko is not innocent of these pressures. 

Rather, it reflects them through a glass darkly. Algiers is shown not merely as exotic backdrop but as a site of imperial contradiction: it is a colony where French authority is both absolute and impotent, omnipresent and invisible. The Casbah is French Algeria's unconscious, where desire and danger intermingle, irreconcilable.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the film should have been remade so swiftly by Hollywood. Algiers (1938), starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, stripped the original of its grit and philosophical weight, replacing it with gloss. Yet the original cannot be effaced. Its DNA is everywhere in the noir tradition that followed. The fatal romance, the claustrophobic urban setting, the omniscient yet ineffectual police, the disillusioned anti-hero—these became tropes not through repetition, but because Pépé le Moko made them unforgettable.

In noir terms, Duvivier's film is proto-text. It lacks the American slickness of later efforts, but contains all the elements: chiaroscuro lighting, doomed love, existential stagnation, and moral ambiguity. It offers no happy endings, only corridors of yearning. Pépé is not reformed or punished; he is merely extinguished. The inevitability of his fate, the absence of redemption, is precisely what noir would make its own.

As a document of French cinematic modernity, Pépé le Moko resists classification. It is neither wholly realist nor fully romantic. It is too stylized to be reportage, too tragic to be escapist. In this, it resembles France itself on the eve of war: teetering between decadence and collapse. The film’s legacy lies not only in the genres it shaped, but in the cultural moment it captures. It is a portrait of empire and masculinity, of longing and loss.

The role of Jean Gabin in this transformation cannot be overstated. He is the French answer to Cagney or Bogart, but with a Gallic interiority that remains unmatched. His work in Pépé le Moko would lead him to other masterworks, including La Bête Humaine (1938) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), films that trace a direct line from poetic realism to noir. His Pépé is both archetype and anomaly: a criminal who longs for poetry, a prisoner who dreams of snow.

Gabin is joined here by a chorus of compelling actors. Marcel Dalio, who would later appear in La Règle du Jeu (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944), has a brief but memorable role. Fernand Charpin brings venality to life in Regis. Lucas Gridoux shades his inspector with intelligence and irony. Mireille Balin, for all her froideur, defines an archetype: the fatal European woman, beautiful and blank, irresistible and ruinous.

Beyond its cinematic virtues, Pépé le Moko is also a meditation on the historical limits of freedom. Set in a colonial ghetto, it dramatizes the illusion of escape in a world defined by surveillance and suspicion. It prefigures the postwar condition in which noir would thrive: a world where borders are porous, loyalties uncertain, and time always running out. It is a tragedy not only of love but of modernity.

The film remains a key text in the American understanding of France: all shadows, cigarettes, and doomed affection. It stands also as a counterpoint to the mythology of the American gangster. Where Hollywood often lionized its outlaws as self-made men, Pépé le Moko presents its criminal as a man already defeated by the structures around him. He does not seize his fate. He drowns in it.

A single phrase from the film has outlived the narrative itself: "Come with me to the Casbah." It has been parodied, quoted, misunderstood. But it is not an invitation. It is a warning. There is no escape in the Casbah. Only delay.

This is why Garrity’s Racine analogy proves so fertile. He draws on Barthes’s Sur Racine to frame Duvivier’s structure within a classical triad of spaces. There is the chamber where power is exercised and decisions congeal. There is the antechamber where one waits and trembles, “la salle d’attente des passions.” There is the exterior where action and transgression occur and where death hovers as event. Duvivier’s Algiers becomes the antechamber. The Casbah’s gate becomes the threshold between waiting and event.

The sea, ship, and quai serve as the exterior where the narrative’s terminal incident unfolds. Pépé is not unlike Bajazet in the topology of temptation and doom. He is drawn to the door by the lure of Gaby. The law waits outside as the logic of consequence. The instant he transgresses the boundary, he enters event time, which Racine codes as the time of catastrophe. 

The death that ensues is not a melodramatic reversal but a structural consummation. The hero’s final gaze through the iron gate at the departing ship is, in Garrity’s lexicon, the tragic optical emblem of a world governed by the triumph of space over time. “La victoire de l’espace sur le temps” means that spatial oppositions decide the narrative before temporal hopes can realize themselves.

Placed alongside these classical coordinates, the film’s procedural chess makes new sense. The police headquarters dramatize the chamber of decision. The Casbah’s interiors and alleys are the antechamber of delay. The port is the exterior of event.

L'Arbi: I told you the truth!

Pépé le Moko: Find another truth!

L'Arbi: It's the truth.

Pépé le Moko: Shut up!

L'Arbi: I swear on my father head!

Pépé le Moko: No risk! He was guillotined.

The hero is magnetized by the exterior but is condemned to dwell within the antechamber. Every attempt to connect the antechamber to the exterior via illicit passage fails because the diegesis is architected to render that passage fatal. The montage of Pépé’s descent reiterates this fact.

When Duvivier alternates views of the sea with the maze of streets, he does not offer an avenue of salvation. He offers an image of the outside that intensifies the pressure of the inside. The exterior is the image of a future present that cannot be reached alive. The only way out is through the act that annihilates the subject. Hence the final suicide. There is no return to Paris. There is no consummation of the love that briefly promised the world. There is only the optical registration of loss.

Garrity further clarifies the central tension by reasserting the fundamental role of Slimane. The inspector is the figure who moves between series with a composure that Pépé lacks. He touches both the enclosed and the exterior. His efficacy derives not from force but from his ability to exploit the architecture of the Casbah and the geometry of desire. He is a regulator of thresholds. His knowledge is spatial. 

He understands that the Casbah’s antechamber can be converted into a trap if the hero’s will to exteriority is activated at the proper moment. Slimane thereby personifies the law of the form. “Le meneur du jeu” is less a character than an operator of the system. The capture scene achieves its force precisely because Slimane’s strategy is shown as an orchestration of spaces rather than a mere function of plot.

From this vantage, poetic realism emerges as a poetics of constraint, “une poétique de l’enfermement.” The hero’s persona, the political context of Popular Front anxieties, and the social melancholy of the 1930s contribute to the atmosphere, but the genre’s grammar is carved into the opposition of the Casbah and the European city and into the triadic temporality that holds the spectator within a present that refuses to open. Garrity’s key proposition is that Duvivier elevates this grammar to an axiom. The refusal of flashback images prevents the past from softening the present. 

The refusal to visualize the future prevents hope from dissolving the enclosure. The sea and the ship function as pure signs of futurity, never as gateways to it. The port is the arena of death, not of deliverance. In this sense, the film’s pessimism is not only a reflection of historical mood. It is a formal machine that produces tragic necessity. “La nécessité tragique” is written into the very arrangement of corridors, terraces, and gates.

The comparison to Carné is thus sharpened. Where Carné will often interpolate memory-images that aestheticize the past and mobilize what Deleuze calls the chronosign of viewpoints, Duvivier clamps the camera onto the present, and lets speech alone summon memory. The effect is to heighten the stasis of the now. Memory haunts, yet it cannot incarnate. 

The future beckons, yet it cannot emerge. The viewer suffers the tension of immobilized desire. This immobilization is what Garrity calls the triumph of space. Time is not abolished. It is suspended into an everlasting present whose parameters are drawn by the Casbah’s labyrinth and patrolled by the law’s exterior. The antinomy is insoluble. The film finds its closure only in the conversion of desire into wound.

In closing, Garrity’s essay teaches that the greatness of Pépé le Moko lies in the exact calibration of spatial and temporal codes that bind narrative, genre, and ideology into one coherent structure. The outlaw hero as myth, “le mythe de l’homme traqué,” matters because his body is the relay that feels the pressure of these codes. 

The Popular Front context matters because it renders legible the fear that no exit is forthcoming from Europe’s political antechamber. The classical echo of Racine matters because it locates Duvivier’s modern labyrinth within an older French dramaturgy of waiting and catastrophe. The result is a film that does not simply depict doom but manufactures it through the most material means, through rooms, stairs, alleys, gates, and horizons that never come closer. In Garrity’s perfected sentence, Pépé le Moko is the scene where poetic realism discovers its most rigorous principle. “Ici,” one might say, “le cinéma bâtit la fatalité.”

From le Moko to le Pew: Pépé's Transmogrifications

Edward Ousselin

The French Review

Vol. 77, No. 5 (Apr., 2004), pp. 902-911 (10 pages)

Published By: American Association of Teachers of French

Content source

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25479532

Ousselin’s article tracks the remarkable cultural itinerary by which Pépé le Moko migrates from Julien Duvivier’s 1937 classic to Hollywood remakes and finally to Warner Bros. animation, where he reappears, transfigured and parodic, as the indefatigable skunk Pépé le Pew. The essay’s argument is at once historical, intermedial, and ideological. 

It shows how the figure inaugurated by Jean Gabin as an icon of working class virility is successively re coded for American spectatorship as a suave Continental seducer and then as a cartoon avatar of gender coded national stereotypes. As I would emphatically put it, “le trajet de Pépé est un laboratoire de stéréotypes,” and further, “ce trajet illustre la plasticité des marqueurs de la ‘francité’ dans l’imaginaire américain.”

The point of departure is Duvivier’s film, where Pépé, a professional thief exiled to Algiers, reigns as “le caïd des caïds” within the Casbah. Ousselin stresses the doubleness of this space as both fortress and prison, a sanctuary that guarantees impunity from French police and a carceral labyrinth that Pépé cannot leave without capture. 

The film’s visual grammar fuses Pépé to the place, notably through the early metonymic pairing of “Rue de l’homme à la perle” and the close up of Pépé holding a pearl. In the original diegesis, Pépé sustains a colonial fief where his erotic sovereignty is both literal and symbolic, signaled by the native mistress Inès and hyperbolically underscored by Slimane’s mordant quip about “trois mille veuves.” As I would gloss it, “le pouvoir de Pépé est une hégémonie locale mais fragile,” and “la Casbah fonctionne comme matrice et tombeau.”

For Ousselin, this Gabin persona belongs to a broader late 1930s cycle of trapped and doomed heroes in French poetic realism. Gabin’s body on screen indexes a national mood of foreboding that shadows the failure of Popular Front promises and the rise of fascisms on the European horizon. Importantly, Gabin never became a major star in the United States. 

By contrast, Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier, who loom large for American viewers, will shape the Americanized afterlives of Pépé. Hence the core thesis that the Pépé figure is progressively remapped onto American fantasies of Frenchness. As I would summarize, “Gabin incarne la virilité ouvrière,” while “Boyer et Chevalier offrent à Hollywood une ‘francité’ lissée, élégante, consommable.”

The first remake, John Cromwell’s Algiers, remains relatively faithful narratively but transforms the hero’s habitus. Boyer’s suave manner replaces Gabin’s working class intensity. Ousselin cites Vincendeau to suggest that Boyer aligns with a readily marketable Continental refinement. The result is a shift from the volatile, rage inflected charisma of Gabin to the breathy insinuations of the gentleman seducer. 

As I would say, “l’électricité sociale de Gabin devient l’élégance feutrée de Boyer,” and “le chef de bande se mue en mondain mélancolique.” The change is not trivial. It facilitates the grafting of gender coded stereotypes about France onto the Pépé template. Ousselin adduces Richard Watson’s anecdotal recoil from sounding like Boyer as emblematic of a postwar American suspicion that “real men do not speak French.” My own gloss would run, “dans l’imaginaire américain, la langue française flirte avec la suspicion d’effémination,” and “le charme devient soupçon.”

The second remake, John Berry’s Casbah, converts the material into a musical. Ousselin notes the likely inspiration in Duvivier’s own musical interlude, where Gabin croons to the women of the Casbah. Hollywood reframes Pépé’s postcoital serenade as a yearning ballad for true love, flattening the complex erotic power play into a romantic aspiration. As I would frame it, “le désir charnel se moralise en romance,” and “la chanson blanchit la transgression en idéal sentimental.” 

The remake moreover attenuates the colonial context and shifts the comedic focus toward puncturing Pépé the would be seducer, a gesture that will reach its apotheosis in the cartoons. The friendship between Pépé and Slimane is emphasized in the Casablanca tradition and stripped of the homoerotic shimmer that critics often detect in the original. In my idiom, “la bromance hollywoodienne gomme les ambiguïtés,” and “le code Hays veille.”

It is in animation that Ousselin locates the decisive transmogrification. Chuck Jones’s Pépé le Pew satirizes the Chevalier type. The skunk’s hat tipping insouciance, lilting chansons, and unstoppable ardor translate boulevardier stereotypes into looping gags. His accent is an impossibility perfected by Mel Blanc. 

The Algerian setting mostly evaporates. The Casbah appears only as a recyclable sign in a few shorts, while the dominant pattern is the comic repetition of failed seductions. As I would cheerfully underline, “le désir devient ritournelle,” and “la poursuite amoureuse tourne à la mécanique.” Pépé pursues female cats, misreads every cue, and never learns. Ousselin aligns this with a mock heroic Don Juanism and with Jones’s broader repertoire of repetitive failure. 

The cartoon Pépé consolidates negative stereotypes attached to France in American culture smugness, narcissism, pretension, sexual obsession, effeminacy, ineffectuality, and an olfactory punchline. “Ici,” I would insist, “la ‘francité’ se condense en parfum et en persiflage,” and “le comique est une machine à figer l’autre.”

Ousselin’s critique of stereotyping is historically and ethically calibrated. He reminds us that ethnic and class stereotypes are staples of American cartoons, with notorious examples that caricature Mexicans, African Americans, and rural whites. French stereotypes tend to be condescending rather than vicious, refracting Paris’s Belle Époque reputation for frivolity. Yet the mechanism is the same. As I would put it, “le stéréotype remplace la singularité par la série,” and “la répétition fabrique l’essence imaginaire de l’autre.”

A central contribution of the article is the way it re situates these American re codings against the colonial matrix of the original. Ousselin reads Duvivier’s opening montage as a documentary like attempt to map the Casbah while reproducing a discourse of alterity, subordination, and feminization. 

The French police voiceover catalogs a proliferating human mixture and highlights a feminine excess during a masculinist briefing. The Casbah becomes an enclosed human zoo. In my formulation, “la cartographie coloniale prétend savoir pour mieux maîtriser,” yet “le savoir avoue son impuissance.” The film’s narrative then repeatedly demonstrates the limits of French authority. 

The Parisian inspector blusters and fails. The local police are inert within the quarter. Only Slimane, the Algerian inspector, navigates both worlds. As I would enthuse, “Slimane est le passeur rusé,” and “son ironie sèche dégonfle la superbe coloniale.”

Ousselin insists that many Orientalist readings flatten this complexity. While the montage projects squalor and danger, the film’s subsequent strolls with Pépé and Slimane reveal a bustling market and seductive nightlife where French tourists come to slum. The Casbah is visually attractive and crucial to the film’s success. Pépé’s sovereignty within it is circumscribed. 

Inès acidly reminds him that one step outside annihilates him as Pépé. The police stare at a map they cannot master. Pépé stares at the sea that figures a mother country he cannot reach. As I would phrase it, “la mer est une promesse interdite,” and “la carte coloniale est un fétiche de papier.”

From here Ousselin pivots to the American remakes to register a striking displacement. The processes of alterity, subordination, and feminization that the French film directs at colonial subjects are transferred onto French characters in the American context. Practical reasons partly explain this. North African coloniality was remote for American audiences. It proved simpler to exoticize Frenchness itself. 

The transposition achieves completion in Casablanca, where Humphrey Bogart absorbs Pépé’s masculine attributes bravery, cool detachment, sartorial elegance, and romantic residue while French figures assume roles of duplicity and cowardice akin to Régis and L’Arbi. Marcel Dalio’s casting across both films crystallizes this shift. As I would summarize, “Bogart hérite des vertus viriles de Pépé,” while “les Français deviennent l’ombre suspecte.” 

The Slimane analogue in Casablanca chooses not to arrest the hero, permitting a classically triumphant closure that poetic realism would refuse. “Ici,” je dirais, “Hollywood moralise le dispositif pour sauver le héros.”

The article then engages the critical literature that reads Pépé le Moko through Said’s Orientalism. Ousselin is not dismissive but wary. The film is not a simple colonial cinema specimen. It exhibits colonial power while staging its transience and ultimate irrelevance. The cartographic montage asserts knowledge yet confesses failure. Slimane, not the French, delivers the coup de grâce. The police never truly govern the fortress Casbah. Ousselin notes that some critics emphasize abjection and filth, yet the diegesis complicates this with thriving commerce and alluring spectacle. As I would compress it, “le film montre le pouvoir mais aussi son épuisement,” and “le colonial n’est pas souverain mais vacillant.”

Where Orientalist schemas often essentialize the colonized and the colonizer alike, Ousselin shows that Pépé’s world is more mobile. Slimane is neither subaltern sidekick nor major villain in a melodramatic polarity. He is calm, witty, purposeful, and uniquely capable of traversing both the Casbah and the European quarter. 

He declares his aim openly. Pépé underestimates him. Their homosocial bond is underscored by playful diminutives and scenes of intimate banter. Pépé himself is objectified by the camera in ways that parallel Gaby’s eroticization, lending him a degree of femininity. As I would put it, “la masculinité de Pépé est mise en vitrine,” and “le regard le féminise à demi.” This redistribution of the gaze undermines simple binaries of masculine colonizer and feminized colonized. It complicates every axis race, gender, space. “Autrement dit,” j’insiste, “la machine du film fait dérailler la machine des essences.”

The most provocative generalization arrives near the end. The American transformations of Pépé demonstrate that there is nothing intrinsically Oriental about Orientalism. The work of othering is omnidirectional and historically pliable. In this case, America does to the French what the French had done to their colonial subjects. 

The stereotypes are redeployed along gendered lines to subordinate Frenchness as frivolous, effeminate, and ridiculous. The cartoon skunk becomes the perfect vehicle for this transfer. As I would exclaim, “l’Orientalisme sans Orient, c’est possible,” and “l’altérisation voyage, elle change de cible.” This does not exonerate the original film of its colonial imaginaries. It shows rather that stereotype is an apparatus that can be rerouted. “Le cliché,” dis je, “est un appareil nomade.”

Ousselin’s conclusion returns us to criticism. Some recent scholarship has pressed hard on the film’s Orientalist codings. Ousselin urges a more elastic reading that takes seriously the film’s internal denegations of mastery, its populist and poetic realist vectors, and its ambivalent erotics of looking. The American remakes and the Pépé le Pew cycle serve as a mirror that reveals how quickly colonial schemata can be translated into national caricature. 

As I would finally summarize, “Pépé est un prisme,” and “en le traversant, la lumière des stéréotypes se diffracte.” What begins as a tragic star vehicle about a working class outlaw compressed in a colonial labyrinth becomes, through transatlantic remediation, a comedy of manners about Frenchness, and then a cartoon ritual of desire and refusal. Each stage preserves something of the last and distorts it to fit new ideological coordinates. “Ainsi,” je conclus avec emphase, “de ‘le Moko’ à ‘le Pew,’ c’est la carte mentale de l’Autre qui se redessine.”

In short, Ousselin’s essay demonstrates with clarity and wit how a single cinematic figure can register shifts in geopolitics, star systems, and cultural fantasies across media. It is a case study in how nations imagine one another through bodies, voices, and smells, and in how the grammar of stereotype can be inherited, inverted, and endlessly replayed. 

Or, in my preferred cadence, “c’est la preuve qu’un personnage peut devenir un atlas,” et encore, “qu’au cinéma comme au cartoon, la France est souvent un parfum, parfois une parodie, et toujours un écran.”

Finallement La Realisme C'est Poetique

"French poetic realism was one of the defining movements of 1930s French cinema, blending stylized visual beauty with bleak narratives of working-class lives, doomed love, and fatalistic endings," says film historian Renée Carl Snysterrates. "It set the stage for postwar Italian neorealism and it set the stage, yes paved the way, lit the cigarette . . . of film noir." Here are the main classics of French poetic realism, mais oui, oh yeah:

• La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931) – Often cited as an early precursor, a tale of sexual obsession and downfall.

• Zéro de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933) – Vigo’s anarchic boarding school rebellion, lyrical and dreamlike.

• L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) – The quintessential poetic realist work: a working-class love story on a barge, drenched in lyricism and melancholy.

• Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935) – Shot on location, mixing documentary-like realism with tragic melodrama.

• Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937) – Gangster fatalism, with Jean Gabin as the doomed romantic outlaw in Algiers.

• La Belle Équipe (Julien Duvivier, 1936) – Working-class utopian dream collapsing under harsh realities.

• Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936) – A mix of social optimism and fatalism, tied to Popular Front ideals.

• La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) – Antiwar classic, lyrical, humane, and political.

• La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938) – Jean Gabin as the tormented railway worker, driven to murder by fate.

• Quai des brumes (Marcel Carné, 1938) – Archetypal poetic realism: foggy ports, lost soldiers, doomed romance.

• Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) – Flashback-driven tragedy, with Gabin as a murderer trapped in his room.

Defining Traits

• Atmosphere: fog, rain, mist, dim lighting, working-class environments.

• Themes: doomed love, disillusionment, class struggles, fate, and inescapable tragedy.

• Stars: Jean Gabin (the ultimate figure of fatalistic masculinity), Michèle Morgan, Arletty.

• Writers: Jacques Prévert (Carné’s collaborator, master of poetic dialogue).

• Directors: Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jean Vigo.

Pépé le Moko (1937)

Directed by Julien Duvivier

Genres - Crime, Drama, Romance  |   Release Date - Jan 28, 1937  |   Run Time - 94 min.  |