Duvivier's masterpiece of atmosphere and poetic fatalism stars Jean Gabin as the colorful gang leader who plays a successful game of hide-and-seek with the police in the Casbah-until he meets his match in a Parisian woman (Mireille Balin). French film historian Georges Sadoul writes, "Though it has all the entertainment value of a gangster film, it is in the context of films like Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève that Pépé le Moko can best be appreciated. As with these other films it has a fatalistic despondency, a background of poverty and violence, a revelation of character through milieu, and a central character who is destroyed by a woman. Pépé the gangster is neither explicitly nor implicitly condemned. He is trapped in urban squalor, finds love, and tries to break away with his ideal woman on a beautiful ship. He runs toward the sea through a cobweb of tenement-lined alleys...but finds his way to love and freedom barred by destiny in the shape of an iron gate and a police ambush... Thus a new myth, a form of 'modern tragedy,' was born-to be used over and over again in the ensuing years."