Pépé le moko

Julien Duvivier's Pépé le moko (1937) is a cornerstone of French poetic realism and one of the films that made Jean Gabin the defining face of pre-war French cinema. It is adapted from a novel by the former criminal Henri La Barthe, and it fuses gangster melodrama with the fatalistic romanticism of the period.

Gabin plays Pépé, the celebrated thief who rules the teeming Casbah of Algiers but cannot leave it without falling into the hands of the police waiting below. Duvivier and his cinematographers make the Casbah a character of its own, a vertiginous warren of staircases and shadows, and Mireille Balin's visiting Parisienne comes to stand for everything Pépé has lost. Its mix of menace, desire and melancholy proved enormously influential.

Hollywood remade it almost shot for shot the following year as Algiers, with Charles Boyer, and its imagery fed directly into the development of film noir: the charismatic outlaw trapped by his own legend recurs through decades of crime cinema. Stylish and romantic, Pépé le moko is a defining work of the French thirties and a key text in the prehistory of noir. Restored prints have kept it in circulation, and its mix of romance, fatalism and exotic locale still feels startlingly modern. Gabin's weary, magnetic outlaw became the template for a kind of world-weary leading man that French cinema would return to for decades.