Back in 1998, I moved to New York City after a boring year-long stint in North Carolina, the details of which are sometimes amusing but best left for discussion elsewhere. I didn't know anyone in New York, but I was looking to get out of Charlotte and had the good fortune of being offered an apartment sublet and a job in the same week. A week later, I was on my way north, the entirety of my life crammed into a creaking 1986 Honda Accord with a leaky roof, no air conditioning, a Funkadelic tape permanently stuck in the cassette deck, and a strange musty odor that I'd never been able to fully get rid of ever since the day I accidentally left the window partially rolled down during Hurricane Andrew back down in Florida.

I arrived in New York in the middle of the night and huffed my meager possessions up the five flights of stairs to my new home, a tiny one-room studio that was still littered with the furniture and undisposed of trash of the previous tenant, who had left the day before to move to London. Among my paltry belongings was the television set I'd owned since leaving for college in 1990: a tiny piece of electronics with a 10-inch screen and no option for cable. It was an odd choice of television sets for a movie buff, but it was all I had, and it served me well for many years, as friends would sit in the floor of my Gainesville apartment, huddled close to the television and watching grainy 4th gen dupes of John Woo and Jackie Chan films, back when John Woo and Jackie Chan films were things of wonder and mystery. And anyway, given the minute confines of my apartment in New York, it seemed the best television for the space, as this was the era before flat panels, and the only way you could be more than a couple feet from the screen was to sit on the fire escape.

Still, I made plans to purchase a more impressive television, something that, perhaps, one could use to receive cable television. But with fifty bucks, top, in my bank account, it was going to be a couple paychecks before I could afford such a luxury. It didn't much matter, to be honest, since I was newly arrived in New York and, despite being a stranger in a strange land, I had ample activities beyond the confines of my apartment to keep me amused, thanks primarily to my friendship with a graphic designer and documentary filmmaker named Ramon who had a wonderfully wicked addiction to the most turbulent and violent corners of the globe. But from time to time, I didn't have the money to go out, or it was cold and rainy, or I just wasn't in the mood to jump a UNICEF flight to Sierra Leone and get shot at by stoned eight-year-olds. On those nights, when I wasn't entertaining a lady or some such other swanky endeavor, I discovered that the local PBS affiliate would show old crime and noir films in the middle of the night.

Now these were the days when PBS still broadcast things some sane human might want to watch, rather than a four-part-series in which an old guy takes you on a historical tour of the city's most famous quilters. You could still hope, in this heady time before the micro-specialization of television channels, to catch some old British spy shows, old monster movies, and less appealing, reruns of Over Easy and, for some reason, the Lawrence Welk Show. During my first week in New York, too broke to go out and kept company by a Styrofoam container of grilled beef and vermicelli drenched in fish sauce from the Vietnamese greasy spoon around the block, I ended up watching a movie whose title I missed, but whose lead character was a dashing French gangster named Pepe Le Moko. It was a completely engrossing movie, somehow made better by the poor sound quality and the fact that reception on my tiny television was crap. A couple days later, in the fancy pants loft space that had been converted into my new office, I used a thing they called the internet to look up Pepe Le Moko. It was through this intense investigative process that I discovered the movie featuring a guy named Pepe Le Moko was titled Pepe Le Moko.

However, when I finally got around to renting the movie and watching it again, I realized that, while this was the movie I'd seen, it wasn't actually the movie I'd seen. For one, it was in French. For another, it had a different guy in the lead role. And finally, although the contents of this movie were almost identical to the contents of the movie I'd seen on late night public television, the ending was different. A little more research revealed to me that the French film Pepe Le Moko was remade a year after it's release, in English, with a different cast but almost scene-for-scene recreation of the original French movie. What I'd seen was a movie called Algiers, released in 1938 and starring Heddy Lamarr and Charles Boyer as Pepe Le Moko -- not be be confused with Pepe Le Moko, released in 1937 and starring Mireille Balin and Jean Gabin as Pepe Le Moko. OK, so mystery solved, and now I have two movies about a dashing French criminal named Pepe Le Moko at large in the mysterious Casbah.

Both films are about a cunning French gangster who is hiding out in The Casbah, where the police will never be able to catch him owing to the loyalty of th locals and the mazelike quality of the neighborhood. However, Pepe is painfully aware of the fact that The Casbah is a prison, since to leave it would be to walk right into the hands of constantly waiting police. When Pepe meets a charming socialite from Paris, his desire to return home manifests itself in her form, causing him to throw caution to the wind and make a break for it.

Both films are wonderful, and while common knowledge says that the French original is better, I actually prefer Algiers, largely on the strength of Charles Boyer's performance (which gives off a Yul Brynner vibe) -- and probably because of the circumstances under which I first watched it. It follows the French film almost to the letter -- even reusing some of the on-location stock footage and asking Boyer to ape Gabin's movements and expressions. If there is a difference -- other than the ending -- it's that Bagin's Pepe seems motivated int he end by a sense of elation and hope, where as Boyer's Pepe seems motivated to make his escape by desperation and sadness. Who would have thought it? An American remake that manages to out-enuii a French original? Even though the end is changed -- one assumes that suicide wouldn't past muster with American censors of the time -- Algiers maintains the heartbreaking, downbeat ending. And in fact, one could still see it as a kind of suicide, since Pepe undertakes his flight to a waiting cruise liner to Paris knowing that he will not make it.

Of course, what's best about home theater is that you don't have to choose. Both Pepe Le Moko and Algiers are incredible, landmark films with appeal that cuts across genre and gender. There's romance, turmoil, heartbreak, adventure, gangsters, shoot-outs, and exoticism a plenty. Both of these movies are ones I can come back to over and over without ever tiring of them.

Labels: Netflix Diaries