We speak of national cinemas, but, at least since the
1950s, there has been something else—movies that are not simply international
coproductions but the work of transnational filmmakers. The key figure in this
hybrid mode is Akira Kurosawa, who drew on Hollywood and Soviet models to
create a new Japanese cinema that crossed national boundaries while appealing
to both popular audiences and cinephiles. But Seven Samurai was not the only
harbinger of cine-globalization. There was also Du rififi chez les hommes,
known in English as simply Rififi.
Jules Dassin’s fatalistic caper flick, shot on the cheap on the streets of Paris in 1954, was
the international success of 1955–56. Given his first opportunity to make a
movie in five years, the blacklisted American director with the French-sounding
name, considered by some to be Hollywood’s leading neorealist for his use of
gritty urban locations, capped the four English-language crime films that had
made his reputation, shared the prize for direction at the 1955 Cannes Film
Festival with the
Soviet Union’s Sergei Vasilyev, and reestablished himself as a European
auteur.
Rififi did not invent the idea of French film noir.
It was Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, released around the time that
Rififi went into production, that provided a new model for the French crime
film with its pungent evocation of a Montmartre criminal demimonde; another
postneorealist noir, Bob le flambeur, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville from a
script by Auguste Le Breton, whose argot-drenched novel provided the basis for
Rififi, was released the same year as Dassin’s film.
Indeed, Melville was originally slated to direct
Rififi, but producer Henri Bérard saw the opportunity to employ a known
Hollywood director who was already a cause célébre in France. (In the spring of 1953, with Dassin set to direct his first
French film, a vehicle for the beloved comic actor Fernandel, red-baiting Hollywood labor leader Roy Brewer had teamed with the FBI to intimidate the film’s producer and
costar, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Dassin was fired, prompting widespread protest among
French directors and screenwriters.) But if Rififi did not invent a
genre, it was nevertheless, thanks to Dassin, a unique synthesis. For the
French, Rififi had Hollywood pizzazz; for Americans, it exuded continental
sophistication; for both, it possessed an authoritative naturalism, albeit one
suffused with a sort of American-in-Paris enthusiasm for Pigalle after dark.
For the rest of the world, it had all of the above.
Jules Dassin (1911–2008) was
a filmmaker who thrived in exile but never lost his American identity. “It is
easier to drive a director out of Hollywood than to drive Hollywood out of a
director,” Andrew Sarris noted in reflecting on Dassin’s particular odyssey.
This urban, urbane artist might be called a rootless cosmopolitan, were he not
so rooted in the movies and theater of the 1930s. The son of an immigrant
barber, Dassin grew up in Harlem and got his professional start during the
Depression, with the Yiddish workers’ theater the Artef (which, tellingly, he learned Yiddish to join).
Moving to Hollywood in the early forties, Dassin
helped establish the
Actors Laboratory (a West Coast corollary of the Actors Studio) and
worked at MGM (directing Conrad Veidt in the 1942 antifascist thriller Nazi
Agent) before teaming up with the newspaperman turned producer Mark Hellinger
at Universal. His promising Hollywood career ended in 1951, when his fellow
directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle named him as a Communist before the
House Un-American Activities Committee. Dassin never testified; he left to find
work in Europe.
Dassin’s Hollywood reputation rests on the foundation
of his four postwar, pre-blacklist movies: the grimly overwrought Brute Force
(1947), part antifascist tract, part existential allegory; The Naked City
(1948), distinguished mainly by its Lower East Side of New York locations and
what James Agee called the “majestic finish” of its chase across the
Williamsburg Bridge; the remarkably tough Thieves’ Highway (1949), with its
hallucinated social realism, adapted by A. I. Bezzerides from his novel about
California teamsters; and the fantastic and stylized Night and the City (1950),
filmed on location in London with Richard Widmark as a doomed hustler in an
expressionistic urban underworld. (To these I would add Dassin’s 1968 American
comeback, Up Tight, a
flawed but compelling movie that boldly transposes John Ford’s The Informer to
a Cleveland ghetto, substituting a Black Panther–like revolutionary cadre for
the Irish Republican Army.)
And then there is Rififi, the most stylish,
cine-savvy, and studiously copied movie in the Dassin oeuvre—a potent blend of
inside dope and outside exoticism. The title was Le Breton’s invented argot for
a crazy mess (if Rififi had been made in the Yiddish theater where Dassin got
his start, it might have been called Tzimmes), a word figuring only in the song
that a sensuous chanteuse and unwitting femme fatale (Magali Noël) performs
twice in the gangster-run nightclub called, in honor of the Buñuel-Dali film on
which Rififi’s art director, Alexandre Trauner, had also worked, L’Age d’Or.
Wildly atmospheric, populated by many mugs with
tilted fedoras, drooping Gauloises, and names like Teddy the Levantine, Rififi
features posturing aplenty—particularly if you include the climactic gunfire
arabesques in the movie’s unrestrained final reel. No one, however, has
anything like the doomed glamour of the tight-lipped, gimlet-eyed, consumptive
Tony le Stéphanois (the Belgian-born Jean Servais), back in Montmartre after
five years in prison, having taken the fall to protect his young protégé Jo le
Suédois (the Austrian actor Carl Mohner, who, despite his relative
inexperience, was the highest-paid performer).
Servais’s Tony is as cold as a corpse, part
desiccated Jean Gabin, part deadpan Count Dracula. Too tough to check his hat
when he descends into the hell of L’Age d’Or to find his old flame Mado (Marie
Sabouret), Tony discovers that she has taken up with the joint’s sinister owner
(played, in keeping with the movie’s internationalist subtext, by a Romanian
émigré, Marcel Lupovici). He establishes himself as the apache dancer’s apache
dancer when he collects Mado mid-assignation and, in the movie’s most shocking
scene, takes her back to his fleabag, where he orders her to strip, starting
with her jewels, then beats her up and tosses her out—keeping the rocks but not
the mink, which he hurls contemptuously after her down the stairs.
Tony is persuaded to join Jo and an ebullient Italian
pimp (Robert Manuel) in robbing the Paris equivalent of Tiffany’s, the
British-owned, luxury-trade jewelry store Mappin & Webb, in the heart of
the city, just off place Vendôme. Their fourth partner, a dapper safecracker
imported from Milan, is played by Dassin himself, under the name Perlo Vita.
John Huston had established the rules of the caper film with 1950’s The Asphalt
Jungle; Dassin put greater emphasis on the process. The gang spends much time
studiously casing the joint and the apartment upstairs, then doing meticulous
research on the store’s hypersensitive alarm system.
The actual burglary—Dassin’s major addition to the
screenplay— is an unforgettable half-hour tour de force. Employing an umbrella
and a fire extinguisher among its tools, the heist involves commando-raid timing and
brain-surgery precision. Tony’s tubercular hack notwithstanding, he and
his confreres exhibit the wordless teamwork of astronauts in deep space. The
only thing to break the silence is the musique concrète of clinking tools, a
humming drill, gently falling plaster, the quickly muffled alarm, and
occasional footsteps in the street.
Jewels taken or, one might say, earned by the mental
and physical labor of Tony and his crew, it’s then a matter of waiting for the
inevitable payoff, as the rival L’Age d’Or gang (North Africans in Le Breton’s novel
but not, per Dassin’s revisions, in the movie) gets wind of the
heist. The subplots come to a boil amid Dassin’s fondness for grotesque,
expressionistic touches (here mostly deriving from the backstage mise-en-scène
at the L’Age d’Or and the playthings that belong to Tony’s godson). And it
seems scarcely coincidental that Dassin makes informing the movie’s cardinal
sin.
Cahiers du cinéma accorded Dassin a two-part
interview, conducted by the young Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, when
Rififi opened in Paris in April 1955; Truffaut later gave the movie two rave
reviews, noting that “out of the worst crime novel
I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen.”
[I have no reason to doubt this.] This early use of the term film noir
preceded by a few months the publication of Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton’s influential
Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953, which, in addition to
extolling Dassin’s Hollywood movies, praises Rififi as “a
film in which Paris is constantly present, not the Paris of smart comedies but
a mist-shrouded and hostile big city.” Dassin, Borde and Chaumeton note, had
made “the only ‘authentic’ film in the French noir series.”
One of the top ten grossing films in France in 1955,
Rififi received sensational notices when it opened in the U.S. a year later,
initially as a subtitled art film, before a dubbed version went into general
release as Rififi Means Trouble!. New York’s Fine Arts Theatre, where Rififi
ran for twenty weeks, anticipated Psycho by four years in stipulating that the
movie had to be seen from the beginning: “Because of the extraordinary nature
of Rififi, no one will be seated once this film has begun.”
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was so impressed with the
movie’s atmosphere that he thought he could smell the funky dives, adding,
“Boy, what would they have done to this picture if it had been put up to
Hollywood’s Production Code” In fact, Rififi was initially condemned by the
Catholic Legion of Decency, while Crowther’s enthusiasm did not pass unnoticed.
The red-baiting Motion Picture Herald attacked the critic for praising a known
Communist who “escaped subpoena service” by fleeing abroad. (Because the film’s
distributor, United Artists, acting through a front company, refused to remove
Dassin’s name from the credits, Rififi can also be considered the first movie
to break the blacklist.)
One of the few pans appeared in the fledgling Village
Voice, where novelist Vance Bourjaily dismissed Rififi as a “gentle fraud”
perpetrated by “uptown critics,” and mocked the crowds queuing outside the Fine
Arts on East Fifty-Eighth Street to watch The Asphalt Jungle in French. But not
even Bourjaily could deny the authority of the heist—“a beautifully detailed
exposition of how to conduct a jewel robbery . . . impeccably convincing and
thoroughly exciting both in event and in atmosphere.”
This great sequence is rendered all the more
self-reflexive (and triumphant) by the suave hamminess of Dassin’s own
performance and the way he places himself, dressed in formal attire, at the
emotional center of the film. He is in essence announcing to the world that he
has cracked the code and come away with a gem.
J. Hoberman reviewed movies for thirty-three years at
the Village Voice. His many books include An Army of Phantoms: American Movies
and the Making of the Cold War (The New Press).
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