Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Humphrey Bogart. This film, like the ones mentioned above, establishes Gabin as the
quintessential French tough guy. Michael Atkinson writes:
Thus, Pépé le Moko isn’t merely a movie to be savored for its own pleasures, but for
the way it resonates with the pop-culture past and future. Before it, gangsters were
inviolate and interesting only in their viciousness, and their timely deaths were
moral objects lessons. Hardened men jeopardized both in the outside world and in
their own guarded psyches were merely law-abiding frontier loners or courageous
working stiffs, like western heroes or Clark Gable in Red Dust and China Seas (both
of which contribute to Pépé’s basic structure). The edges of the rational
commonwealth were clear-cut – not muddy, as they are in the Casbah – and the role
of the self-defined man easy to accept. Certainly, before Pépé the true anti-hero –
the rational man whose moral code conflicts with society, and whose destiny is
marked by an ongoing argument with the world – is difficult to find in movies.
(Atkinson 1999:76)
Pépé’s moral codes certainly go against those of the society, as Atkinson notes, and it is
this central character who provides an equivocal portrayal of the human condition (the
“ongoing argument with the world”), just like Jean in Quai des Brumes. The existential
angst expressed in these films was their most important thematic trope, along with their
radical inclination to explore issues of political, racial and class conflict.
The misty lights, the wet cobblestones, the long-treed pavements lining the road out
of town, the truth-seeking characters, the idea that nothing in life is more important than
passion, all these elements present in the narrative of these films helped to define a national
cinema of the 1930s which would later be embraced by Hollywood in noir productions.
After all, “This stylised realism of the mise-en-scène is matched by the poetic symbolism
within the narrative” (Hayward 2006:151). From the character’s point of view, the almost
inevitable failure of all projects for escape or evasion and the acceptance of ineluctable fate
are all heavily imbricated in the narrative.
In the poetic realist films described above, the film’s diegesis is so constructed as to
put the degeneration in the male protagonist on display. There is no place for heroism, no
place for significant action. In fact, what travels into film noir from French Poetic Realism
is a personal philosophy of despair, a sense of helplessness. This is even further
emphasised by the setting and lighting, gestures and movement in such a way as to mark
this degeneration. In the case of Pépé le Moko, for example, this is most perceptible in the
photography which is categorically film noir, with its use of shadows and silhouette to
create a sense of clandestine underworld menace. This is most probably the reason why
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