Two Pépés: Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer ... and a third

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Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for many subsequent decades, Jean Gabin was the most popular movie star in France. Starting at about the same time, another French-born actor, Charles Boyer, who had first worked in the United States at the coming of sound, reached the peak of his Hollywood stardom. Both of them enjoyed great international success before the outbreak of World War II, Gabin in the prestigious art films of Jean Renoir (La Grande illusion [1937], La Bête humaine [1938]) and of Marcel Carné (Quai des brumes [1938], Le Jour se lève [1939]), Boyer in movies addressed to mass audiences, the French-made Mayerling (1937) and in Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939). Boyer, the elder by five years, was born in 1899 and died in 1978, two years before Gabin. They made their last films in 1976, crowning professional lives of extraordinary length.

In the U.S., Charles Boyer, marketed as “the Great Lover” in romantic films that called for Continental charm, was also acknowledged as a superb actor (four "Oscar" nominations). His roles tested him in a wide range of roles, mostly as sympathetic characters, attentive to his female co-stars, charming, well-mannered, occasionally tormented (All This and Heaven Too [1940], Confidential Agent [1945]), and once villainous (the murderer in Gaslight [1944]). He was praised for his New York stage appearances in works by Sartre, Shaw, and several sophisticated comedies between the late 1940s and early 1960s. Gabin began singing and dancing in the music hall and found his screen persona in La Bandéra (1935) as the marginalized, idealistic man of the people, quick to anger, a victim of society. Suave Boyer and bad-boy Gabin proved irresistible to women.

The parallel trajectories of these two actors intersect in a single role they both played, first Gabin in 1937, the following year Boyer. The success of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, the film that made Gabin an international star, prompted American producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to the film, reuse the score and much of the footage, duplicate the staging and the decor, and translate the dialogue. (My next post will be devoted to a comparison of the two films.) With a new title, Algiers, Wanger’s retread, directed by John Cromwell, served as the American debut of Hedy Lamarr. Pépé cemented Boyer’s stellar rank just as it had Gabin’s. For years, the French actor’s legion of comic impersonators echoed a line never heard in the film—“Come wiz me to the Casbah”—vainly trying to sound Boyer’s inimitably seductive bass timbre.

Despite the similarity of the set-ups in the French film and its Hollywood remake, the individual allure of each Pépé emerges clearly. In the intimacy of the final encounter between the gangster, sheltered in the Casbah of Algiers, eager to break free, to return to Paris with the gorgeous woman with whom he has fallen in love, we hear Gabin’s mixture of bravado and passion. The French dialogue, most of which you will hear translated in the Boyer clip, connects Pépé’s infatuation for Gaby to his obsession for Paris. Gaby is played by Mireille Ballin, his glamorous co-star in Jean Grémillon’s 1937 Gueule d’amour.  

Boyer is smoother, a bit more refined, but no less persuasive of Pépé’s need to be with Gaby, who embodies his escape from Algiers. And as Gaby, Hedy Lamarr is no less entranced by her desire for Pépé than was Mireille Ballin.

The contrasting styles of Boyer and Gabin are more striking in films made at approximately the same time. In Quai des brumes, Gabin, playing Jean, a character similar to Pépé, a deserter with an overwhelming need to to escape--here from France, needs little time and few words to convince Michèle Morgan’s Nelly that he loves her.

In this sequence from Frank Borzage’s breathtakingly romantic History Is Made at Night (1937), Boyer’s Paul moves incrementally from light-hearted banter to a wordless declaration of love in a night-long tango with Jean Arthur’s Irene. Again, the authenticity of the character’s feeling and the candor written in his eyes exert their power over his co-star and the movie spectator.

 

With the title Casbah, Pépé le Moko had yet another Hollywood remake in 1948. Tailored to the prodigious musical talents of Tony Martin, it boasted a Harold Arlen score. Singing “It Was Written in the Stars” to the Gaby of Marta Toren, Martin’s silken timbre is undefeated by the static of this clip.