By STEVEN ERLANGER


MARSEILLE, France - Marseille prides itself on being a port city, a rough melting pot of differences rather like its signature dish, bouillabaisse, which combines various fish, some very expensive and some considered just a cut above trash.

Some of the toughest districts in France’s second-largest city are in the hills above L’Estaque, which inspired Braque and Cezanne. But poverty is high, drug use is common and resentments run deep.

Samia Ghali, 40, is the new Socialist mayor of these districts, or arrondissements, with nearly 100,000 constituents. Of Algerian descent herself - like roughly a quarter of Marseille’s 826,700 people - she is consumed by the economic crisis washing over France and its poor, and she is convinced that these neighborhoods are going to burn.

“With the economic crisis, it will finish by exploding here.”

She sees danger in the youth riots in Greece, even with their anarchist character.“It’s a cry of alarm, a kind of warning,”she said.“We shouldn’t believe that what’s happening in Greece can’t happen here.”

Not everyone agrees with her dark assessment, of course. Jean-Claude Gaudin is the longtime mayor of Marseille, a member of the governing center-right party and vice president of the French Senate. A large man of 69, with a voice that echoes around his palatial office, Mr.Gaudin dismisses those fears.

Because of the sea and the beaches, and because the population is so mixed - with poor and Muslim communities inside the city, not funneled into suburban ghettos like in Paris - Marseille, he said, is a model of racial calm.“There are fewer disturbances in Marseille than in any of the other big cities of France,”he said.“This is a city used to foreigners.”

Integration, however, is not the same, notes one of Mr.Gaudin’s contemporaries, Jean-Pierre Daniel, who lives and works in the“northern neighborhoods”above L’Estaque. One small safe harbor here is L’Alhambra, a movie palace of the 1930s, lovingly restored by the city of Marseille and Mr.Daniel, 69, a determined man in love with cinema.

Son of a merchant mariner, Mr.Daniel has run L’Alhambra since it reopened in June 1990 - seven years after the city bought it as a wreck. Nearly six of those years were spent in that special form of French debate called“cultural politics.”

The left, which dominated the area, finally agreed with the right that a“cultural center”should be built to help“rehabilitate the neighborhood,”Mr.Daniel said. But the city did not have enough money,“so they bought an old cinema instead, as a political gesture, and they asked me to run it.”It is the only public hall in an area of nearly 100,000 people.

The only request, he said,“was not to provoke the voters with politics.”With that charge, he created a place for education, relaxation and culture. The theater is of the old style, with 250 seats in steeped rows and a huge screen from floor to ceiling. He shows a mix of classic and modern films, both popular and art-house.

Mr.Daniel and his deputy, William Benedetto, 38, soon to succeed him, present 150 different films a year, with 18 showings a week. There are special shows for schoolchildren, many bused from other parts of Marseille. Prices are kept low - about $5.50 for an adult, around $3.50 for those under 13. Some 45,000 people a year, half of them children, come to see films.

The theater is owned by the city, which provides half the annual budget of $850,000. About 20 percent of the budget comes from tickets, with the rest from state and regional grants.

Mr.Daniel and Mr. Benedetto say they believe that attending a movie theater is a kind of socialization that cannot be had watching television at home.

“It won’t change the world,”Mr.Benedetto said.“But we have the conviction that these movies can change the lives of these kids - they will ask themselves questions that resonate.”