In Pépé le Moko (1937), Jean Gabin played Pépé, a notorious Parisian gangster hiding in the Casbah of Algiers, where the police cannot reach him, but where love and homesickness eventually draw him out. Directed by Julien Duvivier, the film is a masterpiece of poetic realism, and Gabin’s Pépé is its doomed, magnetic centre.
Pépé is tough and tender in the same breath, a man who has built a kingdom in exile and who knows it is a prison. Gabin plays him with a quiet intensity that made the character a legend in France, and the film’s final scenes remain among the most moving in French cinema. It was the role that made Gabin a star, and it set the pattern for the working-class heroes he would play for the next forty years.