By Johnny Ray Huston

PÉPÉ le Moko's visual and verbal velocity often matches that of the French new wave, which arrived some two decades after its initial release in 1936. Director Julien Duvivier introduces the Casbah of Algiers through a rapid montage of expressionist street scenes – one crazily angled corner leading to another and another – as quick-quip commentary likens the setting to, among other things, a vast series of staircases that descend to the sea. Pépé's gangster milieu, in which "some people dream of America as they see it at the cinema" (to quote a song lyric in the movie), also innovated the French renovations of stateside underworld archetypes and architecture found in Jean-Pierre Melville's most famed policiers and in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

Yet Duvivier was dismissed as creatively dead by Godard years before he actually died in a car crash brought on by a heart attack in 1967, the same year of his final (and 69th) film, Diabolically Yours. Viewing Duvivier as an elderly representative of the traditional French cinema they were replacing, new-wave filmmakers/critics denied him auteur honors. In a Cahiers du cinéma essay Jacques Rivette even suggested that Pépé le Moko's star, Jean Gabin, was the film's true director, because "the French style of mise en scene was constructed to a large extent on Gabin's style of acting, on his walk, his way of speaking or of looking at a girl."

Thanks to the new wave's critical voice, similar claims haven't been made for Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. The dapper cement-block Gabin is a more authoritative and iconic presence – comparing him with Humphrey Bogart, critic André Bazin wrote that Gabin is "duped by life," whereas Bogart is "defined by fate." But Duvivier is as responsible as his singing actor – a child of the stage – for the fact that Pépé le Moko is the signature movie of both. (In one scene Pépé can be seen wearing a shirt with the initials JG monogrammed on a pocket, a tiny conflation of star and character.) The subtle swiftness of Pépé le Moko's camerawork and editing extend beyond Gabin, whose character is in fact trapped, and the sharp contrasts of the film's influential pre-noir lighting are magnified in Duvivier's custom-made close-ups for Gabin. (Ginette Vincendeau's book about the movie isolates one shot in which Gabin's eyes are "sharply illuminated, to such a degree that, legend has it he suffered burns.")

Prisoner and ruler of the Casbah, Pépé is an almost absurd totem of French colonialism. "Having seen the Casbah of Pépé le Moko, I began to look at the staircases of my own old city with a different eye," Vincendeau quotes Italo Calvino as having written. "The French cinema was heavy with odors whereas the American cinema smelled of Palmolive." That may be so, but Pépé's French characters move through the movie's sweaty orientalist realm with perfumed cleanliness. (Ironically, the racist aspects of the Pépé character were magnified in turn by Chuck Jones's Pepé le Pew parody.) The film's prejudices are most evident in its treatment of the title character's two love interests: the Parisian Gaby (Mireille Balin) is lit to sparkle like the diamonds she wears, while Inès (Line Noro) is left to glower in the dark.

Henri Jeanson's dialogue reaches its peak in the back-and-forth between Pépé and his most determined pursuer, the unflatteringly monikered Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), with Slimane playing cat to Pépé's mouse, tortoise to his hare. As the two trade barbs, the sexually ambiguous Slimane is emasculated, but his perspective – while coded as conniving and weak – doesn't just provide the film's chief moments of wit; it also imparts the story's ultimate wisdom. The fatalistic lesson Pépé learns the hard way is one that film noir directors (but not their protagonists) went on to benefit from: beware of a spurned lover when an X-shaped shadow falls on his or her face.