Rififi (118 mins, 12) Directed by Jules Dassin; starring Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Marie Sabouret
Edward Dmytryk, one of the great Hollywood exponents of film noir, emerged from jail in 1951 after completing an 18-month sentence for contempt of Congress as a member of the Hollywood 10. Disgusted with communism and wanting to get off the blacklist, he immediately appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and named several other Communist Party members, including another leading film noir director, Jules Dassin.
Not wanting to continue the daisychain of confession and betrayal, Jules Dassin went into European exile and, after four years of unemployment, wrote and directed his best-known movie, Rififi (Du Rififi chez les hommes), one of the greatest crime movies ever made. It's now released in a marvellous, high-contrast monochrome copy with new subtitles that have dispensed with the stupid US slang used in the version released here in 1955.
Cinematic accounts of well-planned hold-ups go back at least to The Great Train Robbery of 1903, and the heist movie in its serious and comic form had become a genre well before Rififi. Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was clearly Dassin's model, and the great Georges Auric composed the music for both The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Rififi. Dassin later made another highly enjoyable heist film, Topkapi (to which homage was made in Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible ), but Rififi remains the high watermark of the genre.
Rififi (underworld argot for a violent confrontation) is, of course, most celebrated for the 20 minutes in which Auric's somewhat excitable music suddenly stops. In silence, punctuated by natural sounds, four professional criminals break into the Paris branch of Mappin and Webb from the flat above and steal 240 million francs' worth of jewellery (or 'ice' as we call the stuff).
This influential robbery scene, however, is only the centre of the picture, and what Dassin did with the Série Noire novel by crook-turned-author Auguste Le Breton is conveyed by François Truffaut's comment that: 'One of the worst crime novels I have ever read Jules Dassin has made into the best crime film I have ever seen.' Dassin created credible three-dimensional figures of his four sympathetic protagonists - the ringleader Tony (Jean Servais with the tired look just out of jail); the two Italians, Mario (Robert Manuel) and the expert cracksman César, flown in from Milan for the job (Dassin himself under the pseudonym Perlo Vita); and Joe the Swede, (Carl Möhner) who has given hostages to fortune in the form of a wife and child.
The first three wear hats and dark suits; the Swede is hatless and dresses in light-coloured clothes. Reflecting Dassin's political situation at the time, they're hard men but bound by a code of honour that separates them from the dishonourable, sadistic crooks who try to rip them off.
Above all, however, there's the semi-documentary realism Dassin developed on American locations (the photographer Weegee was his technical adviser on The Naked City). This is a harsh Paris, shot in all weathers and without artificial light, that was to influence Jean-Pierre Melville and the Nouvelle Vague.
A garish nightclub in Montmartre; a rundown café with a poker school in the backroom; the empty streets as the city slowly comes to life at dawn; the crooks' very ordinary flats; the heroes unshaven and dishevelled after a night of crime; the femmes fatales who think 'good behaviour' means deceiving prison governors - the milieu and the people are familiar enough, iconic almost. But, with his eye for the expressive detail, Dassin makes us see it all for the first time.
