Word: dassins
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...decade - from Bruce Force through his next film, the Hellinger-produced police procedural The Naked City, and up to the Christ allegory He Who Must Die in 1957 - Dassin's world is a man's world, and he focuses on it admiringly, avidly. The interest in male flesh was unusual for 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...
...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...
...Julius Dassin was born in 1911 in Middletown, Ct., and raised in Harlem. He acted in New York's Yiddish theater and directed plays on Broadway. Starting in 1941, he did seven years under contract at MGM, where his very first film showed at the very least that he was a gifted mimic of a great young master. Dassin's 20-min. version of The Tell-Tale Heart, released in late Oct. 1941, was possibly the very first movie to be influenced by Citizen Kane (which came out less than six months before). This short film, with Joseph Schildkraut...
...frantic suburban comedy. Reunion in France, which opened within a month of Casablanca, has a similar plot - Paris society belle Joan Crawford is tempted to leave her Resistance-hero husband for American airman John Wayne - but it's miscast, risibly implausible, your basic botch. In The Canterville Ghost (1944), Dassin's job was to referee between two shameless scene-stealers: Charles Laughton and the seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien. If there's a magic moment in any of these features, it might be the climax to Two Smart People (1946), where gunzel Elisha Cook, Jr., falls dead...
...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...