Maurice Tourneur’s Justin de Marseille (1935): transatlantic influences on the French gangster

Abstract

In this article, the author analyses Maurice Tourneur’s 1935 film Justin de Marseille as an example of the Gallic gangster film. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) has received more critical attention in this regard in part because of the general critical neglect of Tourneur’s work, but also because Justin de Marseille offers a curious juxtaposition of quasi-ethnographic images of everyday street life in Marseille and proto-film noir chase sequences involving darkened streets and violent criminals. Justin de Marseille is a useful case study because it explicitly negotiates between French and American models of urban criminality in the interwar period at the level of style and narrative. The author shows how Tourneur’s film satirises the French fascination with American and Gallic gangsters as a press phenomenon, namely the consequence of French journalists hungry for sensationalistic stories to sell newspapers. He interweaves a cultural history of the French fascination for gangsters with an analysis of how Tourneur contrasts the acquisitive and individualistic American-inspired gangster with a more properly Gallic one who values honour, artisanship, community and solidarity.

Keywords:

• French gangster film
• French gangsters
• history of French criminality
• Justin de Marseille
• Maurice Tourneur

Notes

1. Unattributed article in Scarface (1932), BNF-ASP, Coll. Auguste Rondel, 8 Rk 8459.

2. The association of Marseille with opium was a widespread interwar cliché. In his pseudo-ethnography of the French underworld, Panorama de la pègre (1935), Blaise Cendrars called Marseille the biggest opium market in the world (2006, 13:21).

3. I do not mean to suggest that he is entirely against the newspapers. Following the scene in which Justin successfully thwarts Esposito’s plans, Tourneur again shows the journalist dictating his story by telephone: ‘Harder and harder. The formidable gangsters seem to have exceeded the limits of the possible’. Before the journalist can finish his story, Tourneur cuts to a shot of Justin reading the article to his gang members. He appears proud of the last sentence that reveals that the police have no suspects. This scene suggests that what counts for Justin is as much the kind of gang activity as the fact of its reporting by the press.

4. The translation appeared very soon after the American original. See Pasley (1931).

5. For more about the relationships between the American gangster figure and French poetic realism, see Pettersen (2016, 62–108).

6. Some of the cultural history in this article draws on material from my book, Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016). I am grateful to the University of Wales Press for permission to reprint this material here.