Rififi ***** Dir: Jules Dassin With: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Marie Sabouret, Janine Darcey, Claude Sylvain 120 mins, cert 12

Jules Dassin's classic jewel-thief caper of 1955 looks as smart as paint, with its unendurably tense, entirely wordless robbery section, and its beautifully constructed payoff in the final act, built on failures to communicate superseded by the cellphone age. In fact, the whole robbery is from a low-tech, even pre-tech era, larceny on a human scale, hinging simply on spraying fire-extinguisher fluid into an alarm-grille, which somehow makes it more real and more exciting.

As ex-con Tony, Jean Servais has a tremendously cold and haggard look (Ray Milland is the nearest Hollywood equivalent I can think of). And he has a very gamey sadism scene when Tony orders his duplicitous mistress to strip naked, starting with her mink and jewellery, and then lashes her with his belt, a punishment to which she loyally, even lovingly submits. (Can you see George Clooney trying it with Julia Roberts in Ocean's Eleven 2?) The desperadoes with their guns and girls careering from dusk to dawn about the monochrome Parisian streetscapes prefigure A Bout de Souffle and Les Quatre Cents Coups, movies in whose company Rififi doesn't disgrace itself. A diamond.