Robert J. Maxwell The Casbah is accurately described under the opening credits as a neighborhood of Algiers that was built on a series of marine terraces and stops at the sea. It really was a seedy and fetid maze of dwellings that provided a home for criminals. In the Algerian War fought by the French, it was a hiding place for the nationalist rebels. I conducted a thorough investigation of the area by reading the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry.The police have been trying to nab the notorious criminal, Pepe le Moko (Charles Boyer). However, he has many friends who warn him when the police are coming, and there is a labyrinth of hidden passageways and tunnels that make it extremely difficult. An investigator comes down from Paris to kick some local butt.He's met by frustrated local cops who explain the situation to him. The most memorable of the policiers is the smiling, philosophical, slightly oily Joseph Calleia. He's irresistible. The head honcho from Paris leads a police squad into the Casbah and Pepe and his friends run them ragged. Of course, if Pepe should ever stroll out of the Casbah, he's yesterday's news. Boyer knows he can't come out, and it fills his heart with melancholy because he yearns to go back to Paris. Ah, Paris -- La Place Blanche, La Gare du Nord, Les Filles de Joie, La Bourdaloue.Enter a wealthy tourist, Hedy Lamarr, who sports a perfectly elliptical face with a vertical axis, and who drips with the jewelry that catches Boyer's eye. Her real name, of course, isn't Hedy Lammar. Nobody is named Hedy Lamarr. Don't kid yourself about that. She was born into a royal Austrian family and named Prinzessen Brynhyldr von Speck und Brodt. Please, it doesn't make her less appealing.Among the denizens of the Casbah we can glimpse Leonid Kinsky. He was one of two of Hollywood's resident comic young Russians, the other being Mischa Auer. Vladimir Sokolov was Hollywood's ancient, mystic Russian -- the only one. He had a busy career.It's an interesting film, not gripping, and a bit stagy, but generally well executed. The musical score is strictly pedestrian but the photography and direction are quite good. There's a spooky scene involving the deliberate murder of the pudgy trembling traitor, Gene Lockhart, done to the overloud tune of a rickety piano. At the opposite end of the scale, a chipper song by Boyer, "C'est La Vie," threatens to turn the romantic drama into a musical comedy. It's painful to watch. The large supporting cast does well by their roles. Boyer is smooth and French, but it's hard to believe at this point in time that the ladies swooned with such abandon over Boyer and his accent. His resonant baritone was imitated by impressionists for years afterward. "Come Wiz Me...." Boyer has a serious problem, though. He has a native girl friend, Sigrid Gurie, who adores him but whom he shoves around and tells to shut up all the time. Well, we all know that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Pepe should never have left the Casbah to intercept the woman of his dreams at the boat dock, at least not with Sigrid Gurie knowing about it.The ending is a sea of bathos though, in a sense, Boyer does finally escape from the Casbah.

sddavis63 Pepe le Moko, played by Charles Boyer, is some sort of international criminal mastermind wanted in countries throughout Europe, and to stay free he holes himself up in the Casbah, a mysterious part of Algiers where even the police are reluctant to go, until a senior officer is sent from Paris to capture le Moko once and for all. For le Moko, although the Casbah allows him to remain out of police custody, it also becomes a sort of prison at the same time - a place he can't leave, because the moment he does, he knows he'll be arrested.Boyer's performance was good, and I can understand why he was nominated for an Oscar. He captures the essence of such a character - a perfect combination of very dangerous and yet very classy at the same time. The movie itself, unfortunately, was quite a letdown. A number of parts of the story seemed inconsistent, of which I'll mention two. First was the idea that the police wouldn't enter the Casbah. That was stated pretty clearly at the beginning of the film by the local commander, and yet repeated references in the movie suggest that in fact the police did enter the Casbah fairly regularly. So, neither the suggestion by Commissioner Janvier that the police wouldn't enter, nor the statement by Inspector Slimane (also a decent performance by Joseph Calleia) that they could get into the Casbah but not out seemed to make much sense. I also found it difficult to believe that le Moko - hardened criminal mastermind that he was - could be so quickly swept off his feet by Gaby (Hedy Lamarr) to the point where he entertains the local populace by singing love songs and then leaves the Casbah to find her, essentially giving himself up. I understand the irony of the final few scenes, of course, as Pepe leaves the freedom of his prison (the Casbah) only to find real freedom in his capture (because he's shot and killed by the police.) I just found it impossible to believe that someone like le Moko would fall into such a trap.This is worth watching for Boyer, and to a lesser extent Calleia, but the story is disappointing and inconsistent. 3/10

Julia Arsenault (ja_kitty_71) Here is the film (and the man) which was the inspiration for my favorite Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew. This film starring Charles Boyer, Sigrid Gurie, and Hedy Lamarr. The Walter Wanger production was a remake of the successful 1937 French film Pépé le Moko, which derived its plot from the Henri La Barthe novel of the same name. John Howard Lawson wrote the screenplay. Though admittedly, I had never read the novel or seen the French film. The movie was a sensation because it was the first Hollywood film starring Hedy Lamarr whose stunning beauty became the main feature for moviegoers. The story is like in the original French film (and novel), about a beautiful rich girl Gabrielle (Gaby) ,who is on holiday in Algiers with her fiancé, and meets and falls in love with the notorious jewel thief Pepe le Moko, has for two years lived in, and virtually ruled, the mazelike, impenetrable Casbah, the "native quarter" of Algiers. I had heard of the film and I just had see this film. So I had taped on TCM and I watched it and I love it. And you know that song that was played (and sung) in the film "C'est la vie" it's kind of catchy.

lastliberal No, Charles Boyer never said, "Take me to the Casbah." That is just as false as "Play it again, Sam," a line from a film that will come to mind when watching this one.Boyer (Conquest, Fanny, Gaslight) picked up his second Oscar nomination for this film. He plays a jewel thief that has found a haven in the Casbah in French Algiers. He has a hot girlfriend in Sigrid Gurie, but he sees Hedy Lamarr and it is all over. he falls head over heels and spends languid afternoon reminiscing about a Paris that he can never see again.Director John Cromwell, who had his career ruined by McCarthy fascist in the 50s, did a very good job of presenting the excitement of the Casbah and the attempts by the French police to trap Boyer. He was ably assisted by the sets decorated by Alexander Toluboff (Stagecoach, Vogues of 1938) and the cinematography of James Wong Howe (The Rose Tattoo, Hud), who along with Toluboff received an Oscar nomination for this film, the first of ten in his career.Just like Kong, it wasn't man, but beauty killed the beast. In this case, the beauty of Hedy Lamarr proved to be the death of Boyer in an ending that will again remind one of Casablanca.