Old Yorker

  • Pépé le Moko

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julien Duvivier (1937)

    A great romantic thriller – from the headlong, graphic description of the Algiers casbah which sets the scene, to the ship’s horn that drowns out Pépé’s despairing cry to Gaby, the Parisian woman he’s fallen in love with, as her ship sets sail for France.  Crime mustn’t pay so Pépé le Moko (Jean Gabin), a gangster in hiding and in exile in the casbah, isn’t allowed to reclaim Gaby or Paris, his spiritual home (although one assumes he’s actually from Toulon – that’s what the slang ‘Moko’ implies).  Yet this is a film in which you root so strongly for the criminal hero that to leave him handcuffed on the harbour at the end would be deeply disappointing.  There is therefore a sense that he’s escaped when Pépé manages to pull a knife from his jacket and end his life with it.  This they’ll-never-catch-me-alive final twist is as comforting as it’s saddening.  The suicide is tragic and a relief.

    Julien Duvivier, with his cinematographers Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger, made a motion picture that’s remarkable for its time – the expressive speed of the camera movement in Pépé’s climactic rush for freedom is especially extraordinary.  What Pépé sees as his steps quicken down towards the city, the harbour and the sea is contrasted wonderfully with what Gaby sees – not Pépé but a sunny blur of high buildings beyond the harbour – as she looks out from the departing ship.  Duvivier did the adaptation of Henri La Barthe’s novel with Henri Jeanson and Jacques Constant; La Barthe himself also gets a screenplay credit (as ‘Detective Ashelbe’).  The writing is sharp and witty from the start but you find yourself smiling less as the impossible circumstances of Pépé, his furiously possessive partner Inès and the other criminals holed up in the casbah sink in and take hold.  The growing complexity of the situation and of the narrative tone is most impressive.

    As Gaby, Mireille Balin has a metallic quality which makes Jean Gabin’s sensual intimacy all the more amazing.  Balin is beautiful but she seems like the image of a woman rather than a flesh and blood one – because she almost isn’t there on screen, the effect of Pépé’s kissing Gaby or telling her how great she smells is to enhance the sense that he’s actually making love to the city of Paris rather than its human epitome.  If this makes Pépé le Moko sound high flown and ridiculous, I’m misrepresenting it.  And Pépé is very human – he treats Inès (Line Noro) appallingly.  The successive scenes in which he seems to have come back to Inès, then sees Gaby arriving at the casbah and changes his mind, are a startling combination.  Pépé seems to recognise that Inès has saved his life then decides that she didn’t need to.  She betrays him finally and she knows that he knows.  Pépé le Moko ends in death or unhappiness for nearly all concerned.  The sequence which features the death of two characters, Pierrot (Gilbert-Gil) and Régis (Fernand Charpin), is brilliantly imaginative in what Duvivier doesn’t show and in his use of music.  Jean Gabin speaks quietly on the whole:  Pépé le Moko doesn’t need to raise his voice to assert his authority – it’s when he’s moved to shout that you realise he’s vulnerable.  Louis Gridoux is excellent as the shrewd police inspector Slimane – that name is almost onomatopoeic.  The smaller roles are strongly played – Gaston Modot is, as usual, especially good – and the atmosphere of the casbah is extraordinarily vivid.

    22 May 2012

  • People on Sunday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Menschen am Sonntag

    Robert Siodmak (1930)

    I first learned about People on Sunday when I went to the human geographer Matthew Gandy’s inaugural lecture at UCL in 2009.  The lecture, entitled ‘Borrowed Light: A Journey through Weimar Berlin’, included excerpts from this silent movie and I was excited when I saw that it was screening at BFI (although in fact it’s possible to watch the whole film online).  The BFI programme note included pieces from Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin (the latter by Richard Combs) and both, as might be expected, situate People on Sunday purely in cinema history.  Its place there is assured and deserved but the larger historical meanings give the film huge intrinsic interest and make the experience of watching it exceptional.

    The characters are Berliners, enjoying their weekend but with jobs to return to on Monday morning – as a wine seller, a taxi driver, a sales assistant in a record shop, a model and a film extra.  The snatched Sunday that the film describes is a record of a way of life in Germany that would also prove to be temporary.  You naturally wonder what happened, after the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Nazi regime, to the people who lived in this time and place.  Because the actors in the five main roles in People on Sunday were amateurs and, in real life, had the same jobs as the characters they played, they are more than symbols of ‘ordinary people’ living in Weimar Germany:  they are those people.  Did Christl (the extra), Annie (the model) and Brigitte (the shop assistant) become Nazi supporters?  Did Wolfgang (the wine seller) or Erwin (the taxi driver) fight in World War II?  Thanks to the internet and IMDB in particular, the fate of the principals turns out not to be quite the unanswered question I expected.   Except for the model Annie Schreyer, each of them made a couple more movie appearances although none went on to a career in cinema.  It’s not clear from IMDB what happened to Schreyer or to Erwin Splettstösser but Christl Ehlers, who had Jewish ancestry, left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, and died in a plane crash in New Mexico in 1960, aged forty-eight.   Wolfgang von Waltershausen, who has film star looks, died, as old as the century, in 1973.  Brigitte Borchert lived into the present one:  in 2000 she appeared as herself in a television documentary short called Weekend am Wannsee.  She was a hundred years old when she died in 2011.

    That Brigitte, Christl and Wolfgang aren’t lost in history doesn’t alter the mystery of the other people – whether minor characters or extras or faces in the crowd – in the film.  During the Saturday, Wolfgang meets Christl and invites her to a picnic at Nikolassee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin, the following day.  On a beautiful sunny morning, Christl goes to Nikolassee with her friend Brigitte, Wolfgang with his friend Erwin.  After a fractious Saturday evening, Erwin’s wife Annie stays in bed and sleeps away her Sunday.  (There’s something horrifying about her losing this free time.)  The foursome have their picnic, swim in the lake, play records on a portable gramophone, ride on a boat.  In the meantime, Wolfgang flirts with Brigitte, causing tensions with his original date Christl.  The action is embedded in a documentary description of the city and the lakeside.  Some elements are clearly staged.  When Erwin and Annie have a row and cut up the photographs on their wall of each other’s movie star idols, the scene, although meant to be comical, has a vicious quality. There’s an odd bit featuring a group of schoolboys mucking around at Nikolassee, and smacking each other’s backsides; and a powerful sequence in which a professional photographer takes pictures of the many and various day trippers.   The photos taken form a montage of freeze frames:  some of the faces are unmistakably Jewish and the effect is, needless to say, poignant (as is that of the names on some of the shop fronts in the centre of Berlin).  Although it’s a brilliant summer’s day, the sunlight – in retrospect at least – seems fragile. The sunshine lasts well into the evening yet this seems only to increase a sense of its eked out transience.

    It was especially interesting seeing People on Sunday so soon after Caesar Must Die.   In both films, real people are playing themselves but using a ‘made up’ script.  The events in People on Sunday might well have happened to the people concerned but may not have happened in exactly the way shown:  the players strike just the right balance between being caught by the camera and seeming to give a performance.  Even at only seventy-three minutes, the film feels a bit long – perhaps because of the relative lack of to and fro in relationships that you would expect in a conventional drama.   This may be why the episode on the pedalo on the lake works well, when the burly, clownish Erwin and the sexually confident and effortless Wolfgang start chatting up the girls in another boat:  it’s in character (Wolfgang takes the lead, completely naturally) but briefly promises a development of the story.

    The film ends, as it must, with a return to work on Monday morning.   The original negative of People on Sunday, which comprised just over two thousand metres of film, is lost.  The version shown by BFI, amounting to 1,839 metres, has been constructed mainly from a print from the Netherlands with some other sections acquired from Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.  The fate of the people on screen in People on Sunday may be largely obscure but what happened to those behind the camera is a very different matter – although still to a large extent a consequence of the end of Weimar and the rise of Nazism.  The director was Robert Siodmak.  The producers were Edgar Ulmer and Seymour Nebenzal.  The principal writer was Billy Wilder – there are screenplay credits too for Siodmak and his brother Curt.  The cinematographer was Eugen Schüfftan.  One of the assistant directors was Fred Zinnemann.

    11 May 2013

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