“Pépé le Moko” in “Algiers”

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Remakes have been coin of the realm as long as cinema has been a commercial enterprise. A proven success is somewhat of a guarantee that its subsequent refashioning will also attract audiences. The new version may be updated, relocated, reconceived. It may take advantage of newer technologies, as was the case when silent films were remade as talkies. And at the dawn of the talkies, the late 1920s and early 1930s, the major U.S. studios made it a practice to reshoot their films for foreign markets nearly simultaneously, utilizing the same sets and stagings, in French, Spanish, and German. The mirror-imaging of one culture’s product, albeit in a different language, soon proved unsatisfactory. But the significant refashioning of a property in the same language, or in another, has inspired some directors to re-create major works. Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), immediately comes to mind. And Hitchcock topped his own 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much with his own remake in 1956.

The case of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko and John Cromwell’s Algiers is unusual in that the Hollywood remake of the French-language film, more a throwback to the simultaneous copy of the early sound era than a recasting of the original, enjoyed enormous success. As I mentioned in my previous post, producer Walter Wanger was determined to recycle as much of Pépé le moko as he could--musical score, the location shots of Algiers, the set design, the staging. Great swaths of the dialogue are literal translations from the French. There are subtle differences between the two pictures, mostly in the loss of texture and the depiction of the denizens of the Casbah, the women, in particular, whose presentation more clearly identifies them as prostitutes in the French version. Again, as I mentioned in my last post, the individualities of the stars, Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer are pronounced. And the leading actresses, Mireille Ballin and Hedy Lamarr in addition to their physical difference, supply distinctive tones to their roles, Ballin brittle, quick with repartee, a woman who knows her way around and has no illusions, Lamarr, more languorous, yielding, sadder.

Take a look at the final scene in each film. The similarities are striking. Yes, the U.S. version is less detailed than the French, but the positioning of the characters creates the same effect in each. More interesting is the obvious difference. First, the French version. (I was unable to find a copy of this excerpt in French. This clip is from the Italian language version. The sequence has very little dialogue.)

Now, the Hollywood version.

Pépé’s death becomes a suicide by cop. Since the U.S. production code frowned on suicide, this became the solution to the problem. The elimination of the much of Inès’ anguished participation and the addition of the hero’s words as he dies, achieves a less bleak resolution.

John Cromwell had the unenviable task of simulating the work of Julien Duvivier, a director at the peak of his career, and of tailoring a picture to the expectations of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the U. S. moviegoing public. And in the spirit of maintaining an urgent narrative rhythm, he eliminated Tania’s song, one of the most memorable scenes of Pépé le Moko. Tightly woven into the rich atmosphere of the original movie, Tania, a minor character, the “woman” of a member of Pépé’s band of thieves, sits with the despondent Pépé. The disappointed lover believes that Gaby has stood him up. And with the loss of Gaby he has lost his dream of Paris, the city and the life she represents. Played by beloved music-hall singer Fréhel, the blowsy Tania expresses the despair she shares with Pépé, her yearning for Paris and the memory of her former self, when she was a star. She cranks a turntable and places the needle on the record. The camera pivots to a photo of the pretty, young Fréhel and lingers a long moment before pivoting back to the singer who at first listens to her own voice, then joins in the nostalgic song, recalling the particular square, the Place Blanche in Paris, that linked Pépé and Gaby as they fell in love in the Casbah of Algiers. Fréhel/Tania sings “Où sont-ils?” (Where have they gone). The distance between the two images and the two voices of Fréhel is an indelible evocation of the spatial and temporal alienation that supply the movie’s pulse.

One final word about Tania. In Algiers she is played by Nina Koshetz, a renowned and highly regarded opera and concert singer. We can only conjecture that she was cast in the role because there was to be a song for her, and we can only regret that we do not get to hear it.

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.