Word: dassins
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Technically, Rififi is a masterpiece. It's no real think piece, and when men get shot with bullets like alley cats get shot with peas, nobody is offended. Director Jules Dassin has used every effect of camera and angle, and he never slows down the pace. While it's hard to believe that a fire-extinguisher could ever put Mappin & Webb out of commission--as it does--most gangster films aren't wholly believable, anyway. For instance, when the stopped-up bell starts to ring almost inaudibly, why isn't the Arrondissement's gendarmerie roused by closed wire to action...
...once the burglary is over, Director-Writer Jules (The Naked City) Dassin's imagination fails him. The remainder of the film, with its routine kidnaping, love interest and gang war, seems to have been made by a sadly inferior second team. Jean Servais is coolly efficient as the criminal mastermind, and Carl Mohner and Robert Manuel play his talented assistants. Director Writer Dassin is on screen, too, as an imported Italian safecracker who brings a Latin flourish to his work. Perhaps Dassin spread himself too thin in the picture, but he gathers enough honors in his memorable silent sequence...
...particularly during the love feast during the war." And, said Dmytryk, there were plenty of big names in the party: Writer John Howard Lawson (another member of the "unfriendly ten," whom Dmytryk described as onetime "high lama of the party"), Directors Frank (College Holiday) Tuttle, Jules (The Naked City) Dassin, and Michael (Cyrano de Bergerac) Gordon...
Director Jules (The Naked City) Dassin's staging and Franz Waxman's overwrought musical score try to outdo each other in stridency. Aging (seventyish) Wrestler Zbyszko is natural and dignified in his acting debut, and Actor Widmark turns the neat trick of working up some sympathy for an unsavory character...
...Dassin's erratic direction of actors produces some mixed results: Morris Car-novsky's generalized flourishes as a once-happy Greek, Lee Cobb's flabby, badly timed portrait of a marketeer, Millard Mitchell's hard-bitten acting of a tired truck driver. The Italian glitter girl, Valentina Cortesa, seems a likely candidate for the top-salaried star bracket. In the role of a waterfront fixture, she looks like an unemployed countess, but she spikes the role with a sweater-girl figure, viva-ciousness and great self-assurance...