Word: noir
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...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. He was "strained seriousness" to Andrew Sarris. On seeing Phaedra - an updated Greek tragedy that threw Anthony Perkins into...
...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...
...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...
...jewel-heist flick Rififi, his cinematic reputation would have been secure. But in addition to taut capers like Rififi and 1964's Topkapi, American director and screenwriter Jules Dassin, who was blacklisted from Hollywood after being identified before Congress as a former communist, was also a master of film noir--exemplified in movies such as 1948's police thriller The Naked City and 1950's Night and the City. Among all his solid works, though, it was Rififi--with its masterly 30-min. dialogue- and music-free robbery sequence as a centerpiece--that remained his most influential film. Dassin...
...decoration, the laser geometry of shapes and silhouettes are all maybe signs of a graphic protection linked unconsciously to recession, just like at the end of the '80s." Like Lacroix, Ghesquière was channeling a more austere sensibility in his Balenciaga collection, which, he said, was inspired by film noir, specifically the actress Simone Signoret's hard-edged look in the 1955 movie Les Diaboliques...