Word: rififi
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...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...
...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...
...Rififi, in which four men break into a jewelry store through the ceiling, codified the caper plot: it shows how they plan to do it, then shows how they do it, then shows how they get caught. Except for the gimmick of the silent half-hour, and broad comic turns from a few supporting players, the film plays the material straight. Epiphanies emerge naturally, like the moments when the gang, in the apartment above the shop, chisels a hole in the floor, and we get our first, eerily surreal view of the jewelry premises, as an umbrella is lowered through...
...Rififi scenario was replayed, more for laughs than for suspense, in Topkapi. The gang comprises not the standard tough guys but con artistes on a lark, to steal a jewel-encrusted scimitar from a hall in the Topkapi museum. Maximilian Schell leads a troupe of some of the major muggers of international cinema: Mercouri, Akim Tamiroff, Peter Ustinov (who won an Oscar), Titos Vandis and Robert Morley. But the more valuable member is the 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...
...nice thing about movie careers, unlike movie obits, is that they don't have to be considered chronologically. DVD connoisseurs can play a director's films in any order, skipping the rhinestones, replaying the jewels. Jules Dassin had enough of those - The Tell-Tale Heart, Brute Force, Thieves' Highway, Rififi - as well as moments in many other films that shine like sapphires. And since this is a tribute to an unfashionable director, I'll end with an awkward confession, courtesy of my 17-year-old self. Once upon a time, I loved Phaedra...