Word: dassins
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...Often in Dassin films, eroticism shades into sadism. Brute Force and Night and the City have violent thrashings. In The Law, released in the States as Where the Hot Wind Blows, Gina Lollobrigida is strapped down and whipped by her mother. Jean Servais, the honcho of the Rififi heist, commands his ex-girlfriend to strip and then whips her with a belt; later in the film, Dassin, playing one of the hoods, is lashed to a pillar and shot...
...possible that this gentle, charming man had a hankering to spice up his movies with beefcake and beatings. But it's more likely that Dassin saw similarities between the wielders of the whips and his own bosses in Hollywood, or was finding objective correlatives for his own victimization by the blacklist. Informers, toxic whisperers and people who just can't keep a secret are everywhere in his films, from the gossiping cons in Brute Force to the main character in his U.S. comeback movie Up Tight!, a remake of the John Ford drama The Informer...
...When called by Congress to testify about his early membership in the Communist Party, Dassin skipped to London, where Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck let him shoot the Brit-noir Night and the City. It stars Richard Widmark (who died, also in his 90s, a week before Dassin) as an American tout aiming for the big score, then fleeing from its consequences. In his goon period, with that weird smile (his upper lip raised as if by invisible fish hooks), and outfitted in a checkered jacket so loud it practically barks, Widmark is the perfect sucker in a nightscape made...
...This was also Dassin's first displaced-person movie; you'll understand why, seeing as how the directed was essentially deported from his native country and home industry. He would keep convening foreigners - American, Italian, German, Swiss, Russian - to make mischief in exotic locales: in London (Night and the City), Paris (Rififi), Athens (Never on Sunday), Istanbul (Topkapi). These films were the fictionalized diary of a wandering soul; for Dassin, geography was autobiography...
...muscular Gilles Segal, as the acrobat whose job is to be lowered by rope into the hall from a high window, then remove the case, nick the scimitar and replace the case, all without touching the electronically sensitive floor. It's a swell exercise in suspense, and one of Dassin's finest illustrations of men at work, but it doesn't come till 85 mins. into the movie. Most of the rest is airy banter, suggesting that Dassin & Co.had a better time making Topkapi than most people do watching it. Sober...