PÉPÉ LE MOKO (1937)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
4:45 PM
Thursday May 01*
1:45 PM
Tuesday May 06
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
3:30 PM
Friday May 09*
1:00 PM
Monday May 12
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 94 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Lucas Gridoux, Gaston Modot
Director: Julien Duvivier
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4:45 PM
Thursday May 01*
1:45 PM
Tuesday May 06
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
3:30 PM
Friday May 09*
1:00 PM
Monday May 12
*denotes session will include an introduction
Rating: M
Duration: 94 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Lucas Gridoux, Gaston Modot
Director: Julien Duvivier
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance” – Jean Renoir, 1967
Holed up in the Casbah in Algiers, gangster Pépé (Jean Gabin) falls for the glamourous Gaby and thus begins his trip down the slippery slope to doom. Inspector Slimane sets a trap to entice Pépé from his lair … Master craftsman Duvivier was among the most highly regarded French film-makers of the 30s. Pépé le Moko is among a batch of films he made in that decade which placed him at that peak. Gabin was the best known French actor of his day and his performance in the lead marked a new high of popularity. The creation of the Casbah in a French studio allowed Duvivier full freedom to enhance the dark shadowed, heightened realism that was a hallmark of French cinema in the day.
"One of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing". It succeeds in "raising the thriller to a poetic level.” – Graham Greene, The Spectator
Introduced by Max Berghouse at Ritz Cinemas and Kevin Cassidy at Lido Cinemas
“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance” – Jean Renoir, 1967
Holed up in the Casbah in Algiers, gangster Pépé (Jean Gabin) falls for the glamourous Gaby and thus begins his trip down the slippery slope to doom. Inspector Slimane sets a trap to entice Pépé from his lair … Master craftsman Duvivier was among the most highly regarded French film-makers of the 30s. Pépé le Moko is among a batch of films he made in that decade which placed him at that peak. Gabin was the best known French actor of his day and his performance in the lead marked a new high of popularity. The creation of the Casbah in a French studio allowed Duvivier full freedom to enhance the dark shadowed, heightened realism that was a hallmark of French cinema in the day.
"One of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing". It succeeds in "raising the thriller to a poetic level.” – Graham Greene, The Spectator
Introduced by Max Berghouse at Ritz Cinemas and Kevin Cassidy at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Ben McCann
By Ben McCann
Ben McCann is Associate Professor of French Studies, University of Adelaide.
JULIEN DUVIVIER
Julien
Duvivier was once considered one of the world’s great filmmakers. He was
idolised by Orson Welles and Michael Powell, while Ingmar Bergman once admitted
that, of all the careers that he would have liked to have had, it would be
Duvivier’s. The classicism of his mise en scène, his core thematic
concerns – deception and betrayal, the fragility of the (male) group, the
dangerous woman – and his ability to coax richly nuanced performances by both
established stars and new actors place Duvivier at the apex of French classical
cinema. His is a paranoiac cinema – fear of crowds, fear of women, fear of the
group, fear of the unknown. He returned again and again to the notion of the
crowd dynamic and how individuals were often threatened, humiliated or overrun
by the group.
Duvivier’s breadth, “invisibility”, and sureness of touch led to a five-decade, seventy-film career that zigzagged between multiple genres. He turned his hand to literary adaptations (from works by Zola, Tolstoy, Simenon and Némirovsky), biblical epic (Golgotha, 1935), “sketch” films (Tales of Manhattan,1942), comedy (the Don Camillo series, from 1952 and 1953), Hollywood biopics (The Great Waltz, 1938), a loose retelling of the life of Johann Strauss, film noir (Voici le temps des assassins/Deadlier Than the Male, 1956) and the propaganda film (Untel père et fils/The Heart of a Nation, 1943).
Duvivier was a truly international director, working within the studio systems of Hollywood, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain, and Czechoslovakia, while his films dovetailed with the series of profound technological, social, and cultural leaps that were taking place in France: the conversion from silent to sound film in 1929-30; the development of the Poetic Realist aesthetic in the mid-to late-1930s; the industry exodus to Hollywood in the 1940s; the return to France and a much-changed film landscape in the 1950s; and the emergence of the French New Wave in the early 1960s.
He exemplified professionalism: in a career that spanned from 1919 to 1967, Duvivier returned to the same group of actors and technicians again and again. He worked with some of French cinema’s most acclaimed screenwriters, including Maurice Bessy, Henri Jeanson and Charles Spaak, and deployed stars as diverse as Brigitte Bardot, Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Alain Delon. For a period in the 1930s, he was French cinema’s most globally respected and exportable director, and prizes quickly followed: La Fin du jour (The End of the Day, 1939), that savagely bitter-sweet tale of ageing actors in a retirement home, won the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice Biennale, Best Foreign Film at the National Board of Review Awards, and came second in the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
Duvivier’s historical and generic range vitally responds to and engages with important developments in French and international film practice and policy. His status as “not-quite-auteur” and his marginalised position in the annals of French film history need not detract from the beauty, horror, and often exquisite tenderness of his work. History often forgets to acknowledge those directors who were “survivors”: individuals who just kept on working despite the travails of war, displacement, changing tastes or critical mauling. These are the artists driven by a ferocious work ethic, with a need to keep on scratching creative itches, or fund a comfortable lifestyle, or pivot between the “one for them, one for me” tactic of negotiating the studio system and the financiers. That was Duvivier. And cinema will rarely see his like again.
Small wonder, then, that the great Jean Renoir wrote, on hearing of Duvivier’s death in 1967, the following words: ‘If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.’ (1)
Duvivier’s breadth, “invisibility”, and sureness of touch led to a five-decade, seventy-film career that zigzagged between multiple genres. He turned his hand to literary adaptations (from works by Zola, Tolstoy, Simenon and Némirovsky), biblical epic (Golgotha, 1935), “sketch” films (Tales of Manhattan,1942), comedy (the Don Camillo series, from 1952 and 1953), Hollywood biopics (The Great Waltz, 1938), a loose retelling of the life of Johann Strauss, film noir (Voici le temps des assassins/Deadlier Than the Male, 1956) and the propaganda film (Untel père et fils/The Heart of a Nation, 1943).
Duvivier was a truly international director, working within the studio systems of Hollywood, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain, and Czechoslovakia, while his films dovetailed with the series of profound technological, social, and cultural leaps that were taking place in France: the conversion from silent to sound film in 1929-30; the development of the Poetic Realist aesthetic in the mid-to late-1930s; the industry exodus to Hollywood in the 1940s; the return to France and a much-changed film landscape in the 1950s; and the emergence of the French New Wave in the early 1960s.
He exemplified professionalism: in a career that spanned from 1919 to 1967, Duvivier returned to the same group of actors and technicians again and again. He worked with some of French cinema’s most acclaimed screenwriters, including Maurice Bessy, Henri Jeanson and Charles Spaak, and deployed stars as diverse as Brigitte Bardot, Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Alain Delon. For a period in the 1930s, he was French cinema’s most globally respected and exportable director, and prizes quickly followed: La Fin du jour (The End of the Day, 1939), that savagely bitter-sweet tale of ageing actors in a retirement home, won the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice Biennale, Best Foreign Film at the National Board of Review Awards, and came second in the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
Duvivier’s historical and generic range vitally responds to and engages with important developments in French and international film practice and policy. His status as “not-quite-auteur” and his marginalised position in the annals of French film history need not detract from the beauty, horror, and often exquisite tenderness of his work. History often forgets to acknowledge those directors who were “survivors”: individuals who just kept on working despite the travails of war, displacement, changing tastes or critical mauling. These are the artists driven by a ferocious work ethic, with a need to keep on scratching creative itches, or fund a comfortable lifestyle, or pivot between the “one for them, one for me” tactic of negotiating the studio system and the financiers. That was Duvivier. And cinema will rarely see his like again.
Small wonder, then, that the great Jean Renoir wrote, on hearing of Duvivier’s death in 1967, the following words: ‘If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.’ (1)
THE FILM
Described
as ‘one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing’, by the
writer Graham Greene at the time, Pépé le Moko (1937) remains Duvivier’s
best-known work. (2) It is set in the Casbah district of Algiers, a maze-like
quarter where French police struggle to capture the elusive Pépé, a notorious
Parisian gangster hiding from the law. Though he is safe in the Casbah, due to
its protective community and his ability to avoid capture, Pépé feels trapped,
yearning for his former life in Paris. That sense of imprisonment intensifies
when he falls in love with Gaby, a glamorous Parisian tourist. Their romance
stirs Pépé's longing for freedom but also seals his tragic fate. Duvivier’s
film is about impossible desire and the implacable workings of fate, two themes
that run deep in his work.
The meticulous cinematography is by Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger, and the evocative set design from Jacques Krauss. Duvivier cast well. Alongside the great French star of the time, Jean Gabin, we find familiar faces such as Fernand Charpin, Lucas Gridoux, Marcel Dalio, Charles Granval and Gaston Modot. The key role of Gaby, a version of the “jeune fille moderne” (young modern woman) that we see in many of Duvivier’s films, went to Mireille Balin.
In its bleakness, Pépé le Moko clearly fits into the French poetic realist model. Poetic realism was a term used to classify a small group of dark, atmospheric French films of the mid-to-late 1930s that took realistic stories and infused them with a lyrical, often melancholic tone. The settings were often working-class, and blended criminality with doomed love. The Italian novelist Italo Calvino noted that, after watching Pépé le Moko, French cinema smelled of real odours, as opposed to the Palmolive of American cinema. (3)
Pépé le Moko is also a key work of cinéma colonial (films produced by a colonising nation set in and featuring narratives about their colonies and colonial subjects), made at the pinnacle of France’s infatuation with their North African empire. Duvivier had already demonstrated the strong allure of North Africa in earlier films, such as Les cinq gentlemen maudits (Moon Over Morocco, (1931) and La Bandera (Escape from Yesterday, 1935). Pépé le Moko is similarly suffused with colonialist ideology and culture, most notably in the representation of the colonial space and its “othered” inhabitants as simultaneously exotic and dangerous. Duvivier frames the Casbah as a westernised fantasy of foreign bodies, dark shadows and twisting, narrow passageways, and motifs of difference and disorientation are prevalent.
When the French Afro-Caribbean political philosopher, Frantz Fanon, described the colonial city as a world ‘cut in two’, he might have had the opening of Pépé le Moko in mind. (4) This splitting can be seen twice. Firstly, in cutting from the Algiers police station, in which French authorities discuss Pépé’s ongoing freedom, to images of the Casbah, Duvivier shuttles from the city’s rationalist quartier européen to its haphazard colonial counterpart; and secondly, Duvivier’s representation of the Casbah cuts from real documentary footage of the Algiers Casbah to a reconstructed version of the original at the Joinville studios outside Paris by set designer Jacques Krauss. By the end of this exhilarating two-minute [opening] sequence, the spectator is firmly anchored to the Casbah. Duvivier intertwines an impassive voice-over, footage of the Casbah filmed in low-angle close-up, vivid street names (‘Rue de la Ville de Soum Soum’, ‘Rue de l’Hôtel du Miel’) and Mohamed Iguerbouchène’s diegetic music (music that comes from the fictional world).
As well as being an exemplar of colonial cinema, Pépé le Moko also marks the culmination of Duvivier’s virtuoso formal style in the early years of sound. For Ginette Vincendeau, the film offers ‘an anthology of camera angles and movements, editing, lighting and music then in use in the best of the French cinema.’ (5) The climactic scene illustrates this flair. Pépé runs down the steps of the Casbah towards the port to see Gaby one final time, and Duvivier overlaps two shots to convey Pépé’s frantic state of mind and heightened emotional state. The first shot shows Pépé descending the steps, shot on a soundstage. The second is a tight close-up of Pépé’s face layered onto a glass transparency. When the two shots combine, we see a perfect rendering of Pépé’s hallucinatory subjective experience of the world around him.
The presence of veteran screenwriter, Henri Jeanson, is critical in linking together the film’s populist and colonial filaments. In a famous nostalgic exchange between Pépé and Gaby, the two reminisce about their childhoods in Paris, breathlessly citing evocative landmarks and place names: Rue Saint Martin, the Champs-Élysées, the Gare du Nord, Boulevard Rochechouart, and so on. Later, Tania (played by ageing chanteuse Fréhel) comforts Pépé by singing “Où est-il donc?”, a plaintive ballad which contain the lyrics: ‘Where is my Moulin de la Place Blanche / My tabac, My local bar […] Where are my bals musettes [dance halls] / With their dances to the accordion?’. This ritualistic cataloguing of common cultural motifs of working-class Paris emphasises the notion of the urban landscape as a dying space which can no longer be attained. Jeanson’s dialogue throughout the film thus straddles the poignant and the romantic, serving in a wider ideological sense to cement the primacy of French national identity and symbolise the unattainability of a “lost” Paris.
Two final points to note: firstly, there is an extraordinary scene, midway through Pépé le Moko, in which the treacherous Régis (Charpin) is executed to the accompanying hectic sounds of an accidentally triggered pianola. It was at that very moment, wrote Graham Greene, that Duvivier ‘admirably rais[ed] the thriller to a poetic level.’ (6) And secondly, Hollywood quickly took notice of Duvivier’s talent. A remake of Pépé le Moko was inevitable. Sure enough, Algiers (1938) was directed by John Cromwell and starred another French actor, Charles Boyer. Cromwell allegedly kept a copy of Duvivier’s original film running on set so that he could replicate as closely as possible the original’s cinematography, editing rhythms, and camera set-ups.
Notes
1. Jean Renoir (1998), ‘Death of a Professional’, Sight and Sound, volume 8, issue 9, p. 31.
2. Graham Greene (1972), The Pleasure–Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40, John Russell Taylor, ed. (London: Secker and Warburg), p. 184.
3. Italo Calvino (1976), ‘Autobiographie d’un spectateur’, Positif, 181, May, p. 17.
4. Frantz Fanon (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York, Grove Press, p. 38.
5. Ginette Vincendeau (1998) Pépé le Moko, London, BFI, p. 11.
6. Graham Greene, p. 185.
The meticulous cinematography is by Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger, and the evocative set design from Jacques Krauss. Duvivier cast well. Alongside the great French star of the time, Jean Gabin, we find familiar faces such as Fernand Charpin, Lucas Gridoux, Marcel Dalio, Charles Granval and Gaston Modot. The key role of Gaby, a version of the “jeune fille moderne” (young modern woman) that we see in many of Duvivier’s films, went to Mireille Balin.
In its bleakness, Pépé le Moko clearly fits into the French poetic realist model. Poetic realism was a term used to classify a small group of dark, atmospheric French films of the mid-to-late 1930s that took realistic stories and infused them with a lyrical, often melancholic tone. The settings were often working-class, and blended criminality with doomed love. The Italian novelist Italo Calvino noted that, after watching Pépé le Moko, French cinema smelled of real odours, as opposed to the Palmolive of American cinema. (3)
Pépé le Moko is also a key work of cinéma colonial (films produced by a colonising nation set in and featuring narratives about their colonies and colonial subjects), made at the pinnacle of France’s infatuation with their North African empire. Duvivier had already demonstrated the strong allure of North Africa in earlier films, such as Les cinq gentlemen maudits (Moon Over Morocco, (1931) and La Bandera (Escape from Yesterday, 1935). Pépé le Moko is similarly suffused with colonialist ideology and culture, most notably in the representation of the colonial space and its “othered” inhabitants as simultaneously exotic and dangerous. Duvivier frames the Casbah as a westernised fantasy of foreign bodies, dark shadows and twisting, narrow passageways, and motifs of difference and disorientation are prevalent.
When the French Afro-Caribbean political philosopher, Frantz Fanon, described the colonial city as a world ‘cut in two’, he might have had the opening of Pépé le Moko in mind. (4) This splitting can be seen twice. Firstly, in cutting from the Algiers police station, in which French authorities discuss Pépé’s ongoing freedom, to images of the Casbah, Duvivier shuttles from the city’s rationalist quartier européen to its haphazard colonial counterpart; and secondly, Duvivier’s representation of the Casbah cuts from real documentary footage of the Algiers Casbah to a reconstructed version of the original at the Joinville studios outside Paris by set designer Jacques Krauss. By the end of this exhilarating two-minute [opening] sequence, the spectator is firmly anchored to the Casbah. Duvivier intertwines an impassive voice-over, footage of the Casbah filmed in low-angle close-up, vivid street names (‘Rue de la Ville de Soum Soum’, ‘Rue de l’Hôtel du Miel’) and Mohamed Iguerbouchène’s diegetic music (music that comes from the fictional world).
As well as being an exemplar of colonial cinema, Pépé le Moko also marks the culmination of Duvivier’s virtuoso formal style in the early years of sound. For Ginette Vincendeau, the film offers ‘an anthology of camera angles and movements, editing, lighting and music then in use in the best of the French cinema.’ (5) The climactic scene illustrates this flair. Pépé runs down the steps of the Casbah towards the port to see Gaby one final time, and Duvivier overlaps two shots to convey Pépé’s frantic state of mind and heightened emotional state. The first shot shows Pépé descending the steps, shot on a soundstage. The second is a tight close-up of Pépé’s face layered onto a glass transparency. When the two shots combine, we see a perfect rendering of Pépé’s hallucinatory subjective experience of the world around him.
The presence of veteran screenwriter, Henri Jeanson, is critical in linking together the film’s populist and colonial filaments. In a famous nostalgic exchange between Pépé and Gaby, the two reminisce about their childhoods in Paris, breathlessly citing evocative landmarks and place names: Rue Saint Martin, the Champs-Élysées, the Gare du Nord, Boulevard Rochechouart, and so on. Later, Tania (played by ageing chanteuse Fréhel) comforts Pépé by singing “Où est-il donc?”, a plaintive ballad which contain the lyrics: ‘Where is my Moulin de la Place Blanche / My tabac, My local bar […] Where are my bals musettes [dance halls] / With their dances to the accordion?’. This ritualistic cataloguing of common cultural motifs of working-class Paris emphasises the notion of the urban landscape as a dying space which can no longer be attained. Jeanson’s dialogue throughout the film thus straddles the poignant and the romantic, serving in a wider ideological sense to cement the primacy of French national identity and symbolise the unattainability of a “lost” Paris.
Two final points to note: firstly, there is an extraordinary scene, midway through Pépé le Moko, in which the treacherous Régis (Charpin) is executed to the accompanying hectic sounds of an accidentally triggered pianola. It was at that very moment, wrote Graham Greene, that Duvivier ‘admirably rais[ed] the thriller to a poetic level.’ (6) And secondly, Hollywood quickly took notice of Duvivier’s talent. A remake of Pépé le Moko was inevitable. Sure enough, Algiers (1938) was directed by John Cromwell and starred another French actor, Charles Boyer. Cromwell allegedly kept a copy of Duvivier’s original film running on set so that he could replicate as closely as possible the original’s cinematography, editing rhythms, and camera set-ups.
Notes
1. Jean Renoir (1998), ‘Death of a Professional’, Sight and Sound, volume 8, issue 9, p. 31.
2. Graham Greene (1972), The Pleasure–Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40, John Russell Taylor, ed. (London: Secker and Warburg), p. 184.
3. Italo Calvino (1976), ‘Autobiographie d’un spectateur’, Positif, 181, May, p. 17.
4. Frantz Fanon (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York, Grove Press, p. 38.
5. Ginette Vincendeau (1998) Pépé le Moko, London, BFI, p. 11.
6. Graham Greene, p. 185.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Studiocanal, Australia
Restored in 4K in 2024 by StudioCanal at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory from the 35mm original negative. Funding provided by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.
Director: Julien Duvivier; Production Company: Paris Film Production; Producer: Robert & Raymond Hakim; Script: Julien Duvivier, Henri La Barthe, Jacques Constant, Henri Jeanson; Photography: Marc Fossard, Jules Kruger; Editor: Marguerite Beaugé; Production Design: Jacques Krauss; Music: Vincent Scotto, Mohamed Iguerbouchène.
Cast: Jean Gabin (Pépé), Mireille Balin (Gaby Gould), Gabriel Gabrio (Carlos), Lucas Gridous (Inspector Slimane), Saturnin Fabre (Grandfather), Line Noro (Inès), Marcel Dalio (L’Arbi), Gaston Modot (Jimmy)
France| 1937 | 94 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W | French with English subtitles | UC 15+
Restored in 4K in 2024 by StudioCanal at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory from the 35mm original negative. Funding provided by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.
Director: Julien Duvivier; Production Company: Paris Film Production; Producer: Robert & Raymond Hakim; Script: Julien Duvivier, Henri La Barthe, Jacques Constant, Henri Jeanson; Photography: Marc Fossard, Jules Kruger; Editor: Marguerite Beaugé; Production Design: Jacques Krauss; Music: Vincent Scotto, Mohamed Iguerbouchène.
Cast: Jean Gabin (Pépé), Mireille Balin (Gaby Gould), Gabriel Gabrio (Carlos), Lucas Gridous (Inspector Slimane), Saturnin Fabre (Grandfather), Line Noro (Inès), Marcel Dalio (L’Arbi), Gaston Modot (Jimmy)
France| 1937 | 94 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W | French with English subtitles | UC 15+