PEPE LE MOKO is a classic 1937 French film about a notorious debonair gangster (played with panache by Jean Gabin) who hides from the police in the Casbah district of Algiers, eluding them with ease until at last he is lured out into the open by... you guessed it, love. This is one of those grand cornball romances of the 30's, with an exotic setting, eccentric secondary characters, snappy dialogue jampacked with witty comebacks, a plot driven by gallantry and betrayal, and a pair of lovers who gaze into each other's gorgeous eyes in a dreamy candlelit rapture while the camera moves in for an extreme closeup through a gauzy filter.

PEPE LE MOKO is remembered now chiefly because it has one of the more famous lines in the history of flicks, "Blame it on the Casbah," but Frosty and I enjoyed every extravagantly hammy minute of it.

My rating on the Watson scale: 4. (Measured coldly by objective standards, PEPE probably deserves a 2, but this is one of those special cases where the Watson Pleasure Principle Rating Floor takes precedence over mere logic and reason.)