Pépé le Moko (1937)
Directed by Julien Duvivier
Pépé le Moko, one of France's most wanted criminals, hides out in the Casbah section of Algiers. He knows police will be waiting for him if he tries to leave the city. When Pépé meets Gaby, a gorgeous woman from Paris who is lost in the Casbah, he falls for her.
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What critics compared Pépé le Moko to
Jeunet and Caro's catch the moody, fatalistic mood of "poetic realism," the prewar French like "Port of Shadows" and "Pepe le Moko," and then move way beyond it.
If that’s true, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 crazy quilt — which is screening this week in a new 35mm print at the Brattle — is an arena where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold being one of the few outposts of Western civilization not visited in a movie that cites Velázquez, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Aucassin et Nicolette, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Balzac, Hugo, Poe, Robert Browning, Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Rimbaud, Joyce, Céline, Scott Fitzgerald, García Lorca, Les Pieds Nickelés (a French comic book), Beethoven, Madama Butterfly, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Pépé le Moko, Johnny Guitar, and every one of Godard’s previous films — not to mention Standard Oil (“Put a tiger in the tank!”), Playboy, Coca-Cola, the invisible panty girdle, Algeria, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, and the Statue of Liberty relocated to the Île de la Cité in Paris.
In his desperate run to find the people who are chasing him, Jason hooks up in Madrid with the CIA's Nicky Parsons ( Julia Stiles ), who is given several dozen words to say with somber gravity before Jason is off to Algiers and running through windows and living rooms in the Casbah; I think I recognized some of the same steep streets from "Pepe Le Moko," which is a movie about just staying in the Casbah and hiding there, a strategy by which Jason could have avoided a lot of property damage.