Algiers (1938)

I love this movie so much

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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.

What's a free man to do when he really isn't free? That's Charles Boyer's plight in "Algiers", the classic romantic tale of a jewel thief forced to reside inside inside the notorious "Casbah", a mysteriously large den of iniquity in Morocco's sea-side city of Algiers. And it is not a pretty one. Sure, he has a large group of supporters to hide him inside the hidden, twisted alleys, but he's trapped otherwise, subject to being arrested if he leaves. This entrapment is slowly causing him to loose his mind. But even though the love of the pretty but poor Sigrid Gurie, he falls under the spell of a sophisticated beauty, played by Hedy Lamarr in her American film debut, in spite of the fact that it was simply her jewels that he was originally after.This was undoubtedly Boyer's most famous role, and it is easy to see why. He is extremely handsome, charming, yet complex. He even gets to sing in one brief moment, ironic considering the film was remade as a musical, "Casbah", ten years later. Gurie and Lamarr are beautiful but get only a few moments to shine, mostly in exotic close-ups. As he usually did, Gene Reynolds plays a rat, here an informer who pays dearly for his betrayal in a chilling sequence that won him an Oscar Nomination. Joseph Calleia is equally as memorable as the sympathetic police officer who befriends Boyer inside the Casbah but will be forced to arrest him should he step outside it. There is a brilliant chase sequence between the police and Boyer's gang (which includes Alan Hale Sr.).It should be noted that as this film has fallen into the public domain, good prints are rare, and some have major sound and picture drop-out. I took this into consideration when watching it, knowing full well that when a genius like James Wong Howe is your director of photography, it can't possibly be anything but a masterpiece to watch. Superb direction and wonderful artistic detail are other pluses. And for those who feel the need to confirm the presence of the oft-quoted line, "Take Me to the Casbah", don't waste your time. It's not there. But watch the film anyway for classic movie-making at its technical and artistic best, as well as a leading man deserving of a higher place in the list of Hollywood legends. The ending is a heart-breaker, up there with the classic tearjerker "One Way Passage" for irony.

'Casbah, a melting pot for all the sins of the world'. This definition of one of Algiers' quarters, given in the movie, could apply to Antioch, Alexandria or Constantinople at the height of their power, the great antique and medieval capitals of the corruption, Molochs of the criminality and excesses.I liked ALGIERS, this short treatise of underworld violence and vices, this endearing and feverish lowbrow exotic fantasy, I have found it to be appealing and exciting and, on its level, well—made.As a treatise of fancy sociology thought of in the most trite clichés, ALGIERS, a fruit of the mellow '30s (made in '38), glamorizes amply, in a heightened tone and unsubtle, unpretentious style of film-making, an exotic place, in a manner common in the era's flicks, exalting or exhaling vast projections of what the Tyr, Sidon, Sodom, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria were thought/ supposed to have been in the legendary past, metropolis of pleasure, vice and corruption, the rule of the violence and base passions—part of those blessed ('38—well, on the brink of the war …) times' dream of adventure, here in the popular, lowbrow version; with ALGIERS we take a step into Casbah, the labyrinthine quarter where Pépé rules. ALGIERS is appealing kitsch, it doesn't address the heart, but the taste for an exciting show; labeled as the American remake of a French movie, it boasts a very chic French leading man, the famous and understandably respected Boyer (still _watchable, as a soft—spoken oldster, in a '60s melodrama like BAREFOOT IN THE PARK), here as a tough guy—Pépé, a mastermind of the underworld.As Pépé, Boyer replaces Gabin; but he reminds of Bogart.ALGIERS is a work of popular glamorization and almanac wisdom; Casbah is glamorized, Pépé is glamorized. There are things to be admired in this flick. It has gusto and energy. I liked the movie's score. The cinematography might surprise by its quality and atmosphere.One thing in this movie is subtle, though—Boyer's persona, Boyer does a venomous, a bit charming and insidious Pépé; he looks like the upgraded, boosted and cleaner version of Bogart. Or was it Bogart who looked like a lousy, dirty Boyer?

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.