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.