Master of the Heist

Esteem is a perishable commodity among filmmakers; directors lionized in their prime fall from grace into ignominy or, worse, anonymity. The movies stay the same; only the social fashions change.

Of 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 by a sophisticated alarm system, there’s no one but Dassin to thank for it. An official remake of Rififi is due out next year, with Al Pacino.

But the 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 and screenplay. In 1964, Topkapi also proved quite popular. But that was his last hit, 44 years ago.

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. He was “strained seriousness” to Andrew Sarris. On seeing Phaedra — an updated Greek tragedy that threw Anthony Perkins into the arms of stepmother Mercouri — Pauline Kael compared it invidiously to a Bette Davis weepie. Both were making the same point: that art isn’t only what comes from Europe, and that kitsch wasn’t a Hollywood monopoly.

No 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, and 10:30 P.M. Summer might cure would-be suicides. There are those who found Never on Sunday charming, and Topkapi exciting. They must have been very drunk.” Who, after reading Thomson, would dare say they enjoyed these movies sober?

It was DVD 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!, remain unavailable on DVD. Some of his movies are so hard to find, they have not a single review posted on the Internet Movie Database.

FROM HARLEM TO HOLLYWOOD

Julius Dassin was born in 1911 in Middletown, Ct., and raised in Harlem. He acted in New York’s Yiddish theater and directed plays on Broadway. Starting in 1941, he did seven years under contract at MGM, where his very first film showed at the very least that he was a gifted mimic of a great young master. Dassin’s 20-min. version of The Tell-Tale Heart, released in late Oct. 1941, was possibly the very first movie to be influenced by Citizen Kane (which came out less than six months before). This short film, with Joseph Schildkraut as the guilt-stricken killer, is positively a-swill in Wellesian tropes: the crouching camera, the chiaroscuro lighting, the mood-deepening use of silences and sound effects. But MGM wasn’t a studio that encouraged innovation or eccentricity, and Dassin’s seven feature films there are program pictures that hold no, repeat, no hint of his future gift for putting torment and teamwork on film.

Of this bunch (and, yes, I watched all of them), the 1942 The Affairs of Martha is an all-too-frantic suburban comedy. Reunion in France, which opened within a month of Casablanca, has a similar plot — Paris society belle Joan Crawford is tempted to leave her Resistance-hero husband for American airman John Wayne — but it’s miscast, risibly implausible, your basic botch. In The Canterville Ghost (1944), Dassin’s job was to referee between two shameless scene-stealers: Charles Laughton and the seven-year-old Margaret O’Brien. If there’s a magic moment in any of these features, it might be the climax to Two Smart People (1946), where gunzel Elisha Cook, Jr., falls dead off a balcony during Mardi Gras and lands on a firemen’s cloth hoop held by the crowd of revelers, who gaily keep bouncing the corpse into the air. You could take that as a metaphor for Dassin’s years at MGM.

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, and at the end, pocked with bullets, must complete one magnificent exploit before life seeps out of him. Visually, here as in Night and the City and Rififi, the murk of men’s lives is illuminated only by the beads of sweat on their straining faces, whether the guys are trying to bust out of prison, win a wrestle match or simply the death that’s staring at them through the barrel of a pistol.

For a decade — from Bruce Force through his next film, the Hellinger-produced police procedural The Naked City, and up to the Christ allegory He Who Must Die in 1957 — Dassin’s world is a man’s world, and he focuses on it admiringly, avidly. The interest in male flesh was unusual for those sexually timorous times. Back then, seeing actors like Barry Fitzgerald and Hume Cronyn in sleeveless undershirts carried the jolt of nudity, as did the sight of bulky wrestler types (Ted de Corsia in The Naked City, Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki in Night and the City), or Brute Force‘s lusciously muscled John Hoyt with no shirt at all. Dassin’s appreciation of topless torsos give a special piquancy to the last line of Hellinger’s narration in his docu-drama: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

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.

It’s possible that this gentle, charming man had a hankering to spice up his movies with beefcake and beatings. But it’s more likely that Dassin saw similarities between the wielders of the whips and his own bosses in Hollywood, or was finding objective correlatives for his own victimization by the blacklist. Informers, toxic whisperers and people who just can’t keep a secret are everywhere in his films, from the gossiping cons in Brute Force to the main character in his U.S. comeback movie Up Tight!, a remake of the John Ford drama The Informer.

EURO-JULES AND EURO-JEWELS

When called by Congress to testify about his early membership in the Communist Party, Dassin skipped to London, where Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck let him shoot the Brit-noir Night and the City. It stars Richard Widmark (who died, also in his 90s, a week before Dassin) as an American tout aiming for the big score, then fleeing from its consequences. In his goon period, with that weird smile (his upper lip raised as if by invisible fish hooks), and outfitted in a checkered jacket so loud it practically barks, Widmark is the perfect sucker in a nightscape made for entrapment. The titanic figure of night-club owner Francis L. Sullivan is just one of the menacing clowns in this nutty noir’s sideshow of gargoyle grotesques. This time, instead of borrowing from Orson Welles, Dassin seems to be prefiguring him. Night and the City, made in 1950, is five years ahead of Welles’ even more outrageously mannered Mr. Arkadin.

This was 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.”)

But 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 a ceiling hole and slowly opens (to catch the debris). Formidable!

The 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 the scimitar and replace the case, all without touching the electronically sensitive floor. It’s a swell exercise in suspense, and one of Dassin’s finest illustrations of men at work, but it doesn’t come till 85 mins. into the movie. Most of the rest is airy banter, suggesting that Dassin & Co.had a better time making Topkapi than most people do watching it. Sober.

Dassin made another seven movies, including Survival 1967, a documentary on the Arab-Israeli war. He did a flaccid adaptation off a Marguerite Duras novel, 10:30 P.M. Summer, and returned to the U.S. for Up Tight! (written by its costar, Ruby Dee). His last film was the preposterous Circle of Two, with Tatum O’Neal, then 16, and a dissipated Richard Burton, then 54, as lovers so mismatched they could be in the Guinness Book. It was 1980, and Dassin had outlived his craft. More sadly, he outlived his son, Joe Dassin, a top-of-the-pops Euro-singer, who died, that same year, at 41.

The 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.