Algiers (1938) Movie Review & Film summary, Cast

Hollywood remakes of popular foreign films don’t have much of a reputation these days; in fact, they’re mostly, notoriously lousy. Algiers stands nonetheless as the model and archetype of such adaptations, based on the previous year’s big international hit Pépé le Moko, helmed by Julien Duvivier, who arrived in Hollywood too late to remake his own film. Algiers was instead directed by mildly stylish arch-professional John Cromwell. Adding to the potential disgrace was the fact producer Walter Wanger reputedly tried to destroy all the copies he could find of Duvivier’s hit. Algiers, today a fairly neglected film, was very important in its time for several reasons, most immediately for cementing the stardom of Charles Boyer, and his image of the arch French seducer, for whilst filling in for Jean Gabin was always going to be a tall order, Boyer’s mixture of dash and menace, reined in from the fiery excesses of his showy Napoleon in Conquest, was indelible enough to make it Boyer’s most enduring role. So much so that it provided the template for everyone’s favourite libidinous skunk, Pépé Le Pew, whose creator Chuck Jones mercilessly satirised actor and role and all the associated, cheesy Hollywood shorthand for dubiously romantic foreignness. Cromwell’s facsimile was also the first American film of scandalous Austrian starlet Hedy Lamarr, whose debut in Ekstase (1933) had left her infamous, and her role here made her finally acceptable enough to plant roots after five years’ interval between parts.

In terms of film culture, it’s certain the likes of Casablanca would not have been made without the immediate influence of Algiers, Casablanca having been intended initially as a Lamarr vehicle. Less obviously, but perhaps of deeper consequence, where Pepe le Moko had also been one of the defining works of French Poetic Realism, Algiers was the crucial bridging point between that style and Hollywood, and therefore introduced a fatalistic proto-existentialism and shadowy romanticism to inflect the once purely hardboiled style of American genre thrillers, and which crossbred with pulp and Germanic visual styles to create film noir. Major noir progenitor James M. Cain was credited here as additional dialogue writer, and Cain’s work on this film may well have also contributed to his own later fiction and fed back into the cinematic brand through the similar existential traps in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Algiers was not perfect adaptation: the literal-minded Cromwell aped but hardly recreated the brooding tone of Poetic Realism’s chiaroscuro soulfulness, and there’s a Bollywood moment late in the film in which Boyer’s Pépé regales the Casbah with a song, an interlude which seems like the product of some on-set gag that somehow ended up in the film, or perhaps an attempt to turn Boyer into Maurice Chevalier. In spite of such hesitations, Algiers possesses a simmering low-key force, and a little individual integrity. And in defiance of the intervening decades of send-up, Boyer’s Pepe is in fact an excellent creation without any apparent absurdity. He’s a smooth, likable charmer concealing a ruthless survivor, but that’s not to say the rest is a front; no, he’s a decent man living a dishonest life.

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A jewel thief who’s escaped the French authorities back in his homeland, he now resides within the Casbah section of the titular city, where the frustrated authorities can’t get him without risking their own lives from the thousands of flick-knives carried by that ghetto’s resentful demimonde: the colonial necessities of keeping the oppressed that way, the unravelling of which in the same environs Gillo Pontecorvo so memorably recreated in The Battle of Algiers, is latent and presaged in the landscape on view here. A pushy Parisian Commissioner, Janvier (Paul Harvey) arrives to force an attempt to find and extract Pépé, much to the tolerant amusement of local Inspector, Slimane (Joseph Calleia), whose own methodology is to wait and watch with a patient smile and otherwise provide Pépé with perhaps the only true friend he has in the world. Thanks to weaselly informant Regis (Gene Lockhart), Janvier nearly catches Pépé and his band of followers in the hourse of fence Grandpere (Alan Hale), but they soon make a mockery of the police in the labyrinthine folds of the Casbah. As Janvier stirs up a hullabaloo in the quarter, Slimane takes in hand a group of slumming Parisian tourists, including Gaby (Lamarr), to keep them out of harm’s way, and accidentally introduces her to Pépé when he, in the course of fleeing Janvier’s ruckus, stumbles upon them. Thus commences exactly the situation Slimane believes will draw Pépé out of the Casbah and into his hands, for Pépé falls head over heels for Gaby, a world-shaking beauty who’s engaged as a future trophy wife to a plutocrat.

One of the most interesting shots Cromwell offers portrays Gaby’s companions and Slimane conversing happily, whilst the beauty and criminal stare at each in rapt silence for minutes, carving out a world of two in the midst of the over-busy cafe. Lamarr was never much of an actress, and her discomfort with English dialogue limits her dramatic effectiveness, but it’s hard to deny she was a hell of a screen presence. Her swing from blasé world-weariness and fashion-plate alienation to revealing a blazing smile in clapping eyes on Boyer’s Pépé, who, with his dark suit and short dark hair, resembles some variety of semi-domesticated panther, recalls Norma Shearer’s similar undeniable moment of electric sexual excitement in A Free Soul (1931). And yet it’s an odd romance, because it’s not really a romance. Although magnetically attracted to each other, they remain separate planets in different orbits: Pépé’s attraction to Gaby is mediated through his own longing to return to Paris, and she symbolises a life of wealth and freedom that’s impossible to him, and her attraction to him is filtered by her contempt for her fiancé and her desire to reiterate her essential freedom. She has no intention of giving up the riches he represents, however, any more than Pépé can actually escape the Casbah.

That place is of course a perfect existential prison, multitudinous in its worlds within worlds and air of infinite, colourful mystery, Escher-like in its hundredfold stairs and terraces, its lack of firm orientation and ease of criminal enterprise, and yet finally it’s just a sleazy slum on a sunbaked hill in which Pépé is only ever an exiled king. Pépé begins to lose his air of ineffable cool and animal-like self-possession under the twin strains of falling for Gaby and losing Pierrot. Although Pépé’s a familiar, perhaps iconic, romanticised embodiment of a rebel-criminal, mixed with that odd-man-out image of the individual who cannot escape his society, the film’s portrayal of him, and Boyer’s expert performance, retains a cobra-like striking force when it comes to portraying Pépé’s keeping his house in order, slapping the face of naïve underling Pierrot (Johnny Downs) and sweating suspect traitors Regis and L’Arbi (Leonid Kinskey) with false bonhomie that carefully and coldly destroys their facades before the moment of violence comes.

The most striking moment in the film, transcribed exactly from Duvivier’s, is one in which Regis, held by Pépé’s gang when he seems to have conspired in Pierrot’s disappearance, shrinks in horrid fear when Pierrot turns up, having been brutalised by the cops, and Pépé and roughneck aide Carlos prop Pierrot up so he can shoot the stoolpigeon. Regis accidentally sets off a Pianola in his contortions, that instrument’s blaring jauntiness overlaying the scene’s hysterical menace with a woozy horror. The depiction of the justified punishment of a treacherous fink that doesn’t spare the total inhumanity of the scene, and it’s the sort of scene that sticks in the mind years after. The abrupt noisiness of the scene makes is especially unsettling, for the sequence also exemplifies the cunning, constant use of source music throughout, which adds a diffused, haunting sense of the Casbah’s environs. The actual music score limited to a few unnecessary swooning strings during love scenes. The script, by John Howard Lawson, later to be blacklisted for his outright socialism, adapted officially from Henri La Barthe’s novel (credited to the pseudonym of “Detective Ashelbe”, presumably for a glaze of falsified verisimilitude) with Cain’s added bon mots, is very good, sporting some choice tartly-flavoured lines, mostly spoken by Calleia’s observant, caustically honest Slimane. In conversation with Janvier: “When one can’t choose guns one must work with written brains.” “I prefer guns.” “In your case honest sir such a preference is unavoidable.”

Slimane’s a terrific character, suggesting a prototypical Algerian, Islamic Colombo in his style: a tranquil, friendly, utterly canny man of the world whose conscientious craft contrasts the bullying foolishness of his colonial masters, embodied by Janvier, and yet he also embodies the inevitability of Pépé’s eventual downfall, almost like a midwife trying to ease him towards his end with motherly care. If the film is limited in any significant way, it’s that in dulling the felicities of its French model, it doesn’t respond with sufficient American toughness to take up the slack, and the romance, whilst good, never quite feels as important as it should be. The weakest specific aspect is the dowdy performance by Sigrid Gurie, who was actually billed above Lamarr, and yet who fades into nothingness beside her, as Ines, Pépé’s Casbah concubine. She hovers pathetically about him until, realising he’s inevitably spurning her for Gaby, sets Slimane on his tail when he tries to catch the same boat she’s taking out of the city. She’s such a drag it’s no wonder he wants rid of her.

Visually, Cromwell’s direction is essentially efficient, possessing only a patina of poetry, and Wanger’s independent production values lacks gloss. But James Wong Howe’s terrific, vibrant cinematography makes the Casbah into a suitably exotic space of pooling light and dark, twisted bodies and teeming abodes. He and Cromwell pulled off an admirable coup of technique in the memorable sequence in which Pépé resolves to leave the quarter, concentrating at first on his feet as he walks away from his front door and turns corners in the twisting maze of streets, before offering point-of-view shots where he perceives the bricks and slates of the Casbah fading into visions of the open sea and the Champs-Elysées. The finale, where Pépé is consumed by insensate yearning, and chases after Gaby even at the cost of a bullet in the back, is suitably tragic and retains a compelling sense of desperation resolving into acceptance. Whilst Algiers is never quite as urgent and tough as it could have been and should have been, it was certainly no disgrace, and Boyer, Lockhart, and Howe all deservedly gained Oscar nominations. Cromwell later returned to noir when the genre was in full swing, with the stolid but entertaining Dead Reckoning in 1947.