Other Titles • Rififi (1955) • Brawl Among the Men
Synopses for Rififi (1955)
1.
Hollywood's loss was Europe's gain when Jules Dassin fled America because of the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist at the end of the 1940s. His films helped bring the moral ambiguity of the postwar American thriller to Europe, inspiring a new generation of critics and filmmakers. Writing several years before he made The 400 Blows, François Truffaut praised Dassin for the way his films "combin[ed] the documentary approach with lyricism," a method that would inform many of the new wave films of the '60s.
Rififi, shot on the rainy streets of Paris, is imbued with the same gritty realism that marked Dassin's earlier work in New York (The Naked City) and London (Night and the City). Jean Servais plays Tony le Stéphanois, an aging crook whose thin lips and tired, seen-it-all eyes give him a look somewhere between Humphrey Bogart and Harry Dean Stanton. Out of jail after a five-year stretch, he joins up with a couple of pals to pull one last heist: a jewel robbery that is portrayed in such detail (including tips on how to silence an alarm using a fire extinguisher) that the film was banned in several countries.
The robbery sequence alone, which lasts for 30 minutes and is played entirely without dialogue, would be enough to ensure Rififi's classic status, but there's a lot more to enjoy, including terrific performances from Marie Sabouret as Tony's world-weary ex-girlfriend, and from Dassin himself as a dandified Italian safecracker with an eye for the ladies. After the thrill of the heist, in the film's final scenes when, with the inevitability of the best films noirs everything falls apart, Dassin achieves the lyricism that Truffaut admired so much. By combining the conventions of a caper movie with his own brand of bleak nihilism, he made Rififi into a film that deserves to be counted among the best ever made.--Simon Leake
2.
A banner film that broke through standards of accepted language, dialogue, gun violence, and crime on screen and stylized the film noir genre, Jules Dassin's 1954 film RIFIFI was an instant success. Based on the novel of the same title, DU RIFIFI CHEZ LES HOMMES by Auguste le Breton, the film's use of hard-boiled slang and the gangster garb of trench coats, top hats, and a cigarette dangling from one corner of the mouth went on to become the emblems of Humphrey Bogart-style noir classics.
In RIFIFI, a hardened man, Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) is released from prison after five years to find that his woman has shacked up with another gangster, and the life he had planned to return to no longer exists. Down on his luck and without a dime in his pocket, he rounds up his old crime buddies--who drink and smoke all night assembled around the poker table--and agrees to commit one last crime: a jewel heist. For weeks the men plan, studying the alarm system and working out each detail of the break-in. When it actually comes time to perform the robbery, their actions are perfectly choreographed, their methods precise and successful, and they walk away untouched with millions of dollars of jewels. However, there's a hitch, and what was meant to be the perfect crime turns into a nasty gang war resulting in a blood bath on the glorious streets of 1950s Paris.
3.
After helming such American noir classics as The Naked City and Brute Force, blacklisted director Jules Dassin moved to Paris and embarked on his masterpiece: a twisting, turning tale of four ex-cons who hatch one last glorious heist in the City of Lights. At once naturalistic and expressionistic, this melange of suspense, brutality, and dark humor was an international hit and earned Dassin the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Stars Jean Servais (The Longest Day, That Man from Rio) and Magali Noel (La Dolce Vita, Z, Amarcord).
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