Film Review
Jules Dassin's film noir masterpiece
Du
rififi chez les hommes occupies a pivotal place in French
cinema.
Not only did it mark a definitive turning point in the
development of the
film policier,
bringing far greater realism and viciousness to a genre which had
hitherto been pretty soft-boiled, but it also helped to pave the way
for the French New Wave with its extensive use of real locations, raw
naturalistic edge and total lack of big name actors. There had
been some notable thrillers prior to this one - Jacques Becker's
Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)
being the one most deserving of praise - but it was the success of
Du rififi chez les hommes which
established the policier as a major genre in France, one that would
dominate French cinema for over two decades and inspire some of the
country's most talented filmmakers. The pinnacle of French film
noir, Dassin's film would have a wide-ranging and lasting impact and is
still considered one of the greatest examples of its
genre.
Prior to this career highpoint, Jules Dassin had distinguished himself
in Hollywood with a series of what are now considered landmark film
noir thriller-dramas -
Brute Force (1947),
The Naked City (1948) and
Thieves' Highway (1949).
What set Dassin's films apart from other films noirs of this period is their
arresting near-documentary realism. Dassin was greatly influenced
by Italian neo-realism - films such as Roberto Rossellini's
Rome,
Open City (1945) - and sought to bring the same mordant
authenticity to his own films (partly as a cathartic reaction to the
terminally anodyne films he had been forced to make for MGM). The
anti-Communist paranoia which Senator Joseph McCarthy and his
supporters unleashed in the late 1940s put paid to Dassin's career just
when he was emerging as one of Hollywood's greatest creative
talents. Denounced as a Communist by director Edward Dmytryk when
called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dassin
found his name added to the rapidly growing Hollywood blacklist and was
unable to find work in his own country. Having completed
Night
and the City (1950) in England, he moved to France, but his efforts
to continue his career were thwarted by the long-arm of
Hollywood. Within weeks of being hired to direct Fernandel
in
L'Ennemi public no 1 (1953) he
was dismissed after the cast and crew were intimidated by
representatives of the American film industry. A similar thing
happened when Dassin went to Rome to begin work on an adaptation of
Giovanni Verga's
Mastro don Gesualdo.
Dassin's ill-treatment by the Hollywood mafia provoked a furore in the
French press, and this is what ultimately led producer Henri
Bérard to approach him to direct what would be his most
celebrated film.
Bérard's motivation for choosing Dassin was somewhat
opportunistic. He was looking for someone to adapt Auguste Le
Breton's popular crime novel
Du
rififi chez les hommes but was reluctant to hire a French
director because the villains of the story were black North
Africans. Mindful of prevailing tensions in Algeria,
Bérard considered making the villains Americans, and who better
to direct the film than a maverick American film maker who would have a
natural antipathy towards America? Reluctant to be drawn
into a futile vendetta against his own country, Dassin suggested that
the villains should be French, something that have never occurred to
Bérard.
Initially, Dassin was reluctant to make the film. When he first
attempted to read Le Breton's novel he could make no sense of it at
all, since it was written in a French Parisian argot which he could not
understand. When the novel was translated to him, he took an
instant dislike to it and was repulsed by its overt racism and
references to necrophilia. However, with no other work coming his
way, he agreed to make the film (dispensing with most of Le Breton's novel
as he did so), on what turned out to be a minuscule
budget. With a mere 200 thousand dollars at his disposal, Dassin
was unable to hire any big name actors and it was only through good
will that he secured the services of such talents as set design
Alexandre Trauner, composer Georges Auric and cinematographer Philippe
Agostini, all of whom worked for a fraction of their normal fee.
Dassin himself was paid very little, although he secured a percentage
of the film's profits.
It has often been commented that the casting of Jean Servais in the
leading role is inspired, but this was the result of a chance encounter
between the actor and the director. Servais had once been a major
star of French cinema but his career had waned in recent years through
alcoholism. The actor's world-weary demeanour and
faded rugged beauty, qualities that instantly evoked both repugnance
and sympathy, made him the ideal choice for the part of the ageing
gangster Tony le Stéphanois. It is Servais's
gripping performance that most gives
Du
rififi chez les hommes its burning intensity and stark humanity,
and it is through this film that the actor enjoyed an immediate boost
to his career. The supporting roles went to virtual
unknowns, although their contributions were also of the highest
standard. Dassin was compelled to cast himself in the role of
César le Milanais (under the pseudonym Perlo Vita) when
the actor he had chosen for the part turned out to be
unavailable. It is interesting that Dassin plays the part of the
gang's traitor, and does so in a way that evokes something of the pain
and darkness he must have felt when he was himself betrayed by Dmytryk
a few years previously. Robert Hossein appears in a small role
(controversially playing a drug addict), not long before he became a
major star in French cinema. As the film's stunning femme fatale,
the actress Magali Noël had her big break, which would lead her to
be cast by Federico Fellini in
La Dolce Vita (1960) and two
subsequent films. It is Noël who sings the film's notorious
(and often unfairly reviled) musical number, which explains what the
slang word
Rififi means - a
violent confrontation between rival gangs.
It is not possible to discuss
Du
rififi chez les hommes without reference to its much-vaunted
heist sequence, one that has been emulated endlessly since - most
successfully by Jean-Pierre Melville in
Le
Cercle rouge (1970) - but never improved upon. The
scene, which lasts twenty-four minutes, is played without any dialogue or
music and shows in meticulous detail every step in the jewel robbery,
including the one fatal error which leads inevitably to the gangsters'
downfall. Composer Georges Auric was incredulous when Dassin
insisted that the scene should have no music and went off and wrote a
piece to accompany it. When Dassin showed Auric the scene with
and without the music the musician concurred with the director - the
sequence was far more effective without music. It is this scene
which earned the film a certain notoriety in the press and led it to be
banned in some countries through fear that it was providing a training
manual for crooks. In his defence, Dassin insisted that his
intention was not to inspire the criminal fraternity, but rather to
show how inordinately difficult it is to pull off a successful
robbery. This cut no ice (excuse the pun) with the Roman Catholic
Legion of Decency, which predictably branded the film as dangerously
immoral (which is odd when you consider that all of the protagonists
come to a very sticky end).
Within a month of the film's release in France in 1955, Jules Dassin
was invited to Cannes to receive the Best Director Award, the highest
accolade of his career. Having proven to be an immediate box
office hit in France,
Du rififi chez
les hommes enjoyed even greater commercial and critical success on its international
release, particularly in America where it was shown in an English dubbed
version under the title
Rififi...
Means Trouble. The film inspired a series of inferior
French thrillers with the word
Rififi
in the title, including:
Du rififi
chez les femmes (1959),
Du rififi à Tokyo (1962)
and
Du rififi à Paname
(1966). Although Dassin would doubtless have been able to resume
his Hollywood career after the success of
Rififi, he chose instead to remain
in Europe, where he would make some of his most original films -
Celui qui doit mourir (1957),
Never on Sunday (1960) and
Topkapi
(1964), the latter being a highly amusing parody of
Rififi.
As incisive and enjoyable as Jules Dassin's later films are, none
of these can compare with the sheer
stylistic brilliance of
Du rififi
chez les hommes, his greatest film, which would provide both the
template for many subsequent French crime thrillers and an impetus to
the French New Wave. This is film noir at its most perfect,
a fascinating but gruelling excursion into the Parisian underworld,
vividly conveying the sordid viciousness and brutal precariousness of the
milieu as experienced by its twisted inhabitants, but with a poetry and humanity that
is as keenly felt as a sudden sharp lash of the whip across the
face.
Rififi is not
just a marvellously constructed heist movie. It is a dark and
astute character study which is driven by old-fashioned notions of
honour and betrayal, crafted by a man who knew precisely what these
words meant and who would bear the scars of an ill-deserved betrayal to the end of his
days.
© James Travers 2001
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Next Jules Dassin film:
Celui qui doit mourir (1957)