Crime Street presents Algiers (1938)

Director - John Cromwell

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Plot
Film Notes
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Pepe LoMoko (Charles Boyer) reigns supreme over all the outcasts, criminals and sins within the walls of the Casbah in Algiers. The authorities cannot touch him but he falls in love with a breathtakingly beautiful tourist (Hedy Lamarr), which leads to his first mistakes and his eventual destruction.

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Film Notes

Take Me to the Casbah

Based on an earlier French film, Algiers utilizes some of that film as stock footage, and adds the fine and sure visual touch of master cinematographer James Wong Howe to create an interesting, though inconsistent, international crime intrigue. It predates, but sets the stage and tone for, the classic Casablanca.

And I Quote...

The film begins with the following text:

"Algiers. Where blazing desert meets the blue Mediterranean, and modern Europe jostles ancient Africa. A stone's throw from the modern city, the native quarter, known as the Casbah, stands like a fortress above the sea. Its population includes many tribes and races, drifters and outcasts from all parts of the world — and criminals who find this a safe hiding place from the long arm of the law. Supreme on these heights rules one man — Pepe le Moko — long wanted by the French police."

Add Them Up and...

The combination of three top grade Noir talents - James Cromwell, James M. Cain and James Wong Howe - add up to make Algiers more than worth a look.

Director John Cromwell also helmed Dead Reckoning and Caged. Though he criss-crossed many movie genres, he seemed most at home with dark matters of the heart.

James M. Cain wrote the script for Algiers. His career was the mirror image of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a host of other prose writers who went to Hollywood and failed. Cain left his career as a mediocre (at best) screenwriter and took up the novel to great success. Though certainly not in the league of Faulkner/Fitzgerald, his pulp noirs The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce were more than just good reads and were made into hit films.

Cain's work on Algiers holds an interestingly convoluted, but important connection: French Algerian writer Albert Camus confessed to being highly influenced by the works of Cain. Camus used The Postman Always Rings Twice as a springboard that brought existential masterpiece The Stranger to life.

James Wong Howe's cinematography career began in 1921 and lasted until 1975. Body and Soul, The Sweet Smell of Success, Hud and Yankee Doodle Dandy are just a few milestones of one of the finest artists of the black and white film.

Hedy Lamarr - Bed Hopping to Frequency Hopping

At time of her death in 1977, Hedy Lamarr seemed to make a last ghostly grab at fame more for her patent on "spread spectrum technology and frequency hopping" as for her film career. Though her "research" with George Antheil did not lead directly to the creation of weapons guidance systems, their ideas were expanded on by other engineers and finally put into place in during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The basic principles of frequency hopping later led to the development of cell phones.

Considered one of the most beautiful women in the world during her early Hollywood days, her career reached its celestial heights in her role in Samson and Delilah. Only six more films followed the Biblical portrayal that was the beginning of the end of a career that originally burst into the world with her nude appearance in the Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy. The infamy of Ecstasy led to her first Hollywood contract for Algiers. Her steamy autobiography, published in 1967, chronicled her frequent romantic exploits and film career.

Watch Carefully

• An informer (Gene Lockhart), is executed by a dying man propped up by two associates. It's a fabulous, innovative scene with great camerawork.
• Three quarters into the film, Charles Boyer suddenly bursts into song Hollywood musical style.
• Notice Alan Hale Sr. as a local. He is the father of Alan Hale Jr. (the Skipper on Gilligan's Island).

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Cast

Production Credits

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For more on...

James M. Cain
Albert Camus

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