Word: heist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Their colorful presence has given northern Cyprus a somewhat louche reputation. Over the years, the likes of convicted drug baron Brian "the Milkman" Wright (he always delivers) and Pete "Maggot" Roberts (convicted of selling tainted meat) have holed up there. Last month the chief suspect in Britain's biggest heist, the 2006 theft of $100 million from a security depot, was rumored to be on the island, or to have sent his loot there. (Authorities deny he's there.) With nearly 30 casinos, the tiny territory has also attracted a flourishing nightlife. "It's a beautiful place, a paradise," sighs...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Rififi was a trend-setter but not a total original. John Huston's heist movie The Asphalt Jungle came out in 1950. And two years before Rififi, Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear sent crooks from several nations on a desperate mission: driving trucks loaded with dynamite across treacherous South America roads, with death waiting at each hairpin turn. (Bosley Crowther in The New York Times: "You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode...