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| Rififi (Directed by Jules Dassin) |
Jules Dassin (1911–2008) was born in Middletown, Connecticut in the United States. At an early age his family moved to New York where he was raised in Harlem and educated in the Bronx. Dassin’s parents were originally from Odessa, Russia, and being raised in cosmopolitan New York had a lasting impact on his subsequent outlook. In the mid-1930s, Dassin travelled throughout Europe: France, Greece and Italy, countries which would subsequently be a major factor in his career.
On return to America, Dassin found employment in New York’s Yiddish theatre and worked for the famous Artef Theater in Manhattan, which provided a formative influence on his political and cultural stance. It was during this time that he was exposed to New York’s flourishing left-wing theatre, joining the Communist Party after seeing the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’ seminal drama, Waiting for Lefty, set among taxi drivers on the verge of a strike during the Great Depression of the 1920s. Dassin also worked in radio which led to a stint in theatre direction which in turn, led to an invitation to work in Hollywood where he was employed by RKO to work on sets. He was then hired by MGM where an early short film he directed, The Tell-Tale Heart (1941), based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, won an Academy Award. This led to his first feature, Nazi Agent (1942), which starred the German émigré actor Conrad Veidt. Dassin’s subsequent film, Reunion in France (1942), a wartime resistance drama starring Joan Crawford and John Wayne, was an enormous commercial success.
Dassin, tired of the low quality projects he was obliged to work on, engineered a move to Universal which favoured a greater degree of social realism, location shooting and psychological authenticity. Dassin’s first film for the producer Mark Hellinger was Brute Force (1947), a prison drama marked by a powerful and close examination of male isolation, loyalty and betrayal. Like the film that followed it, The Naked City (1948), it avoided prominent stars in favour of a more democratic approach to casting. The Naked City was based on the successful anthology by the New York photographer Weegee and was distinguished by its striking Lower East Side New York locations
Signing with Twentieth Century-Fox Dassin next worked with the writer A. I. Bezzerides, on a powerful adaptation of his novel Thieves’ Market, as Thieves’ Highway (1949) set within the tough milieu of Californian teamsters. By the time he had finished the film in 1949, Dassin had become aware of the ongoing influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that set out to expose alleged infiltration of the American film industry by Communist Party sympathisers.
Under growing suspicion, Dassin began work on an adaptation of Gerald Kersh’s book, Night and the City, set in London with the American actor Richard Widmark in the lead role. The film provides a dramatic portrait of a doomed hustler in an expressionistic postwar London underworld. As both a Hollywood film and the start of Dassin's European phase, Night and The City is a crucial midpoint in his career. It's an imaginative and stunning example of a London-set noir, focusing on Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), a hard-nosed American ex-pat conman who launches a conspiracy to rule the local wrestling scene with a veteran Greek brawler (Stanislaus Zbyszko), pitting him against his son, Herbert Lom, who effectively controls wrestling in London. Widmark's frantic hero wanders through a London that rarely feels as maze-like as it does here.
The film, like The Naked City, is as much a depiction of a place as it is of its main character, and it’s this wonderfully iconic sense of London that lingers. Max Greene’s spectacular chiaroscuro photography lends a moody, dreamy poetry to an unglamorous side of the city, and Jo Eisinger's lucid script populates it with a cast of compelling characters, from Harry’s tragic, good-natured girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney) to part femme fatale Helen (Googie Withers). Dassin’s noir nightmare is a vivid portrait of postwar London, one of the era’s hardest and most severe studio pictures, and arguably Dassin’s finest work.
While at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, Dassin learnt that Hollywood colleagues had testified against him at the HUAC hearings. His American film career was effectively over, finding himself even barred from the studio lot. In the following years, Dassin returned to Europe and attempted to continue to forge a career in European film production. Dassin was by now held in high esteem as a director in France but various projects failed to get off the ground. Eventually he was contacted by his friend, the producer Henri Bérard, who offered Dassin a chance to work on a best-selling Série Noire book, Du rififi chez les hommes by Auguste Le Breton.
Dassin worked rapidly on a first draft with the veteran scriptwriter, René Wheeler, producing a working draft in less than a week, then deferred to Wheeler who retranslated the script back into French. Substantial changes were made to the story in terms of characterization and narrative. First, Dassin wanted to recentre the film’s emotional heart on the relationship between the older Tony le Stéphanois and his younger protégé, Jo le Suedois. A decision was also taken to delete the novel’s North African aspect and concentrate on the internecine rivalries within the Parisian underworld. Then, thirdly, to introduce the ideas of loyalty and betrayal into the organization of Tony’s gang, echoing the betrayals of the wartime Occupation, as well as reflecting Dassin’s own predicament as a victim of the Hollywood blacklist betrayed by former colleagues.
Perhaps the most important digression from the source text was the decision to concentrate on what was a relatively minor element of the book – the jewellery heist. The lengthy close attention paid to the detail of the robbery is what defines the film for most viewers and the celebrated tension of its realization has had a lasting influence. At the time though, as Dassin recalled, the removal of much of Le Breton’s novel in favour of a forensic focus on a crime and its unravelling “was the only way to work my way out of a book that I couldn’t do, wouldn’t do.”
Anticipating Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, by fifteen years the heist itself lasted a quarter of the movie in near-total silence. Dassin’s remarkable eye for detail had been demonstrated in his previous films, but Rififi surpassed even those in its frank and realistic portrayal of a crime and its perpetrators: the robbers, junkies, and their milieu; while the devastating final act, when their endeavour tragically unravels, is beautifully shot by Philippe Agostini, sealing the fate of these doomed men as the film veers towards the expressionistic.
After the success of Rififi Dassin went on to work on a number of successful and popular films in Europe. Along with Rififi and his early American film noirs, he is probably best remembered today for his two most commercially successful films that featured his wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri – Never on a Sunday (1960), a lighthearted romantic comedy about an affair between a local Greek prostitute and a visiting American classical scholar named Homer, and Topkapi, a caper film set in Turkey. The latter, shot in colour, was the opposite of Rififi in terms of cinematography and its knowing comedic tone. However, the Topkapi Palace heist scenario remains highly suspenseful.
The first review by Truffaut was included in his book The Films In My Life, an extract of which follows:
Le Rififi (Rififi in the United States), the first French film by the American filmmaker Jules Dassin, who came to cinema from directing in the theater, is structured like a classical tragedy. Act I: Preparation for a holdup; Act II: "Consummation" of the holdup; Act III: Punishment, vengeance, death.
It isn’t necessary to point out the modest production budget of Le Rififi before I say that I liked the film and intend to praise it, but it may serve some purpose, if only to demonstrate that a film’s success depends more on its director than on massive production resources or the participation of world-renowned actors.
Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I have ever seen. In fact, this is not a minor genre. Dassin shot the film on the street during high winds and rain, and he reveals Paris to us Frenchmen as he revealed London to the English (Night and the City) and New York to the Americans (Naked City). It would be unfair not to credit also the chief cameraman, Agostini, who truly worked miracles under very unusual conditions: the interior shots in actual dark bistros, nighttime exteriors without lights, the platform of the Port-Royal subway station, tiny details of decor, etcetera.
Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect. The two failures are the female casting and the specially written song, which is execrable.
The direction is a marvel of skill and inventiveness. Le Rififi is composed of three bits of rigorously developed bravura. Every shot answers the viewer’s question, “How?” Dassin remains faithful to his style of combining the documentary approach with lyricism. For the past week, the only thing being talked about in Paris was the silent holdup, splendidly soundtracked, in which objects, movements, and glances create an extraordinary ballet around an umbrella placed over a hole pierced through the ceiling of a jewelry store alive with security systems.
Beyond that, the real value of the film lies in its tone. The characters in Le Rififi are not despicable. The relative permissiveness of the French censors allowed Dassin to make a film without compromises, immoral perhaps, but profoundly noble, tragic, warm, human. Behind the smiles of the three actors – Jean Servais’ bitter, Robert Manuel’s sunny, and Jules Dassin’s sad though with bursts of gaiety – we divine the filmmaker, a tender, indulgent man, gentle and trusting, capable of telling us one of these days a more ennobling story of characters who have been better served by their destiny. That is what we must not forget and why we must thank Jules Dassin.
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