Algiers

Just one year after Julien Duviver’s brilliant French adaptation of Henri La Barthe’s novel, Pépé le Moko, John Cromwell directed an American remake, Algiers, which places slightly more emphasis on Pepe’s romantic entanglements while presenting the Casbah as dirtier and drearier (“rotten with vermin and decay”) than its depiction in Duvivier’s world of poetic realism. In both films, the Casbah (“a melting pot for all the sins of the earth”) serves as the exotic and labyrinthine hiding place for the famous Pépé le Moko (Charles Boyer, whose performance here inspired the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe le Pew), a thief who’s running from Commissioner Janvier (Paul Harvey) of the French police. Pepe maintains a Casbah mistress named Ines (Sigrid Gurie), but his affections are instantly distracted by the arrival of stunning French tourist Gaby (Hedy Lamarr in her film debut), who’s unhappily engaged to the wealthy Giraux (Robert Greig). The wonderful Joseph Calleia plays Inspector Smilane, who knows the Casbah like the back of his hand, enough to understand that Janvier’s traditional methods of extracting Pepe won’t work. Widely seen as an inspiration for Casablanca (1942), Algiers received widespread acclaim and four Academy Award nominations, including for Boyer and cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose camera captures countless beautiful images, many being exact replicas of shots from Duvivier’s earlier film, like when the gang slowly approaches their soon-to-be murder victim from the victim’s point of view.