Word: dassins
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...Jules Dassin, who died this week in Athens at 96, you could say he was the prime developer of the movie crime caper, and leave it at that. His 1955 Rififi, with its wordless, minutely-detailed, half-hour jewel robbery, and the 1964 Topkapi, with an even more elaborate heist, inspired dozens of imitations, in films from The Killing, Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job to The Usual Suspects, Mission: Impossible 2 and that mini-masterpiece of stop-motion animation, Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers. If some star is hanging from a rope over riches protected...
...crime movie was just one item in the dossier of this fascinating, hard-to-pin-down ex-pat auteur. And Dassin lived long enough to watch the fickle swing of fortune's pendulum over and over until the movement became almost routine. It was as if he were a character in one of his heist films: top of the world one minute, disgraced and disconsolate the next, but always angling for the next big break...
...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...
...Critically, too, Dassin was up and down, and then out. He was the first blacklisted director to earn a secure reputation in European films, and under his own name. (Another American exile, Joseph Losey, was making films under pseudonyms.) When the young critic Francois Truffaut saw Rififi, he wrote, "From the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen." Dassin's Euro-movies had a vogue among middlebrow U.S. reviewers, who might have thought he was French. (Pronounce it Zhool Da-saaan.) The hipper critics knew better...
...genre has a quicker sell-by date than self-important melodrama of the elevated sort. And despite the heist films and the ostentatiously life-hugging Never on Sunday, Dassin's main mood was serioso in his films with Mercouri. "Together," writes David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film, "they made some of the most entertaining bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drunk, He Who Must Die, Phaedra...