Word: brutes
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...those sexually timorous times. Back then, seeing actors like Barry Fitzgerald and Hume Cronyn in sleeveless undershirts carried the jolt of nudity, as did the sight of bulky wrestler types (Ted de Corsia in The Naked City, Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki in Night and the City), or Brute Force's lusciously muscled John Hoyt with no shirt at all. Dassin's appreciation of topless torsos give a special piquancy to the last line of Hellinger's narration in his docu-drama: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them...
...Dassin directed some important, and still fascinating, noirish films in the late 40s: Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway. Then he got blacklisted by Hollywood and settled in Paris. After four idle years Dassin achieved international renown with Rififi; he won the Director prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, where he met his future wife, the actress Melina Mercouri. They made nine films together, including his biggest success, Never on Sunday. That romantic comedy, with the director playing a naive American grecophile and Mercouri as the Athens whore who liberates him, landed Dassin two Oscar nominations, for director...
...that revived Dassin's rep - not for the Mercouri films but for his early-prime crime pictures. (Film noir is a genre that never goes out of favor.) The Criterion Collection lavished its legendary care on editions of Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, Night and the City and Rififi. And when that film was briefly released in theaters in 2000, it won a special award from the New York Film Critics Circle. Yet a bunch of Dassin's major Euro-pix, including He Who Must Die, The Law and Phaedra, and his late-60s urban drama Up Tight...
...Dassin had a lucky bounce when producer Mark Hellinger hired him to direct Brute Force, and the director rose to the challenge with one of the boldest, tautest films of the postwar crime cycle. Finally, he was in the gnarled noir territory that suited him. The story of a vicious prison guard (Hume Cronyn) and the angry cons under his boot, Brute Force is a sharp evocation of unrest in a totalitarian state. It also set up motifs Dassin would keep returning to. Here, as in Rififi, the lead character (Burt Lancaster) is a criminal who has our sympathy...
...foremost American picturemaker of his generation. From 1973's Mean Streets through Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas up to his 2006 The Departed (for which he finally won a Best Director Oscar), he has blended elegance with agitation, depicted the anomie of the cunning, late--20th century brute in classical style. Though he's earned his renown with these movies, he's equally adept directing documentaries. Making films like Shine a Light is a vacation from his vocation--an escape from the straitjacket of narrative and from the rigidities of the Hollywood system...