Rififi

Last night (July 27, 2000) I saw Jules Dassin's "Rififi" for the first time in over forty years. This noir tale of a jewelry heist gone bad is being shown at NYC's Film Forum during a 2-week special screening. The 89 year old director and victim of the witch-hunt is in town for the event. In an interview in today's NY Times (July 28, 2000), Dassin explains the meaning of the film's title: "The title comes from the North African tribe, the Rifs, who were in constant conflict. So it's all about melees and conflicts and fighting, out of which the novelist Auguste Le Breton made the word 'rififi.'"

There is a lot of evidence that challenges to the mainstream pop culture of the 1950s owed much to the flickering embers of the 1930s and 40s radical movement. Even when the challenge was mounted in the name of the beat generation, the left played a role. To take one example, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of "Coney Island of the Mind" and founder of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, had deep roots in the anarchist and labor movement of that city.

Although "Rififi" was made in France in 1955, during the time Dassin was in exile, it eventually made its way into American movie theaters, including the Lyceum in Woodridge, a tiny resort village in the Catskills where I grew up. You can even argue that the first breach in the blacklist was "Rififi" rather than Dalton Trumbo's screenplay for "Spartacus."

Although the theater generally featured Martin and Lewis comedies or John Wayne westerns, it occasionally threw an "art movie" into the mix, especially during the busy summer months when relatively sophisticated Manhattanites were in town. I am sure that the fact that the young Hubert Selby Jr. was the Lyceum's assistant manager had something to do with this. Who knows, perhaps "Rififi's" dark, nihilist tones influenced Selby's great collection of stories, "Last Exit in Brooklyn." The film's ragbag of anti-heroes certainly did influence the New Wave in France, especially Godard's "Breathless."

The movie brings together four thieves, who are led by Tony Le Stéphanois (Jean Servais), just released from prison. Tony, a Gallic middle-aged version of Humphrey Bogart, is both consumptive and a chain smoker. This obviously self-destructive character trait sets the tone for the entire movie, one that can be characterized as existential futility in a fedora.

Tony has hooked up with his young protégé Jo the Swede (Carl Mohner), whom he protected from a prison sentence in the heist that got him sent up. Tony refused to name his accomplices because among thieves there is a code of honor. You should never rat on your friends. One can surmise that Dassin's screenplay must have put questions of loyalty into the foreground since so many of his friends and comrades had been ratted out by people like Elia Kazan and director Edward Dmytryk, who named Dassin in the hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist influence in Hollywood

Jules Dassin told Pat McGilligan in "Tender Comrades" (co-authored by Paul Buhle): "They simply placed career before honour. It's that simple. The need to work is very strong. And particularly in the arts it's your life. Their betrayal is a continuing pain because these are the guys I loved."

Kazan of course made a movie called "On the Waterfront" that justified informing. The movie's greatness is a sign of how tragic the loss of Kazan was. In victimizing others, he victimized himself as well.

The other two thieves are Italians. Mario (Robert Manuel) lives in Paris and has worked with Jo the Swede in the past. Since they have decided to crack a safe in what amounts to the Tiffany's of Paris, they decide to bring in an expert from Italy. This is the dapper safecracker Cesar, played to the hilt by Dassin himself using the pseudonym Perlo Vita. When Cesar is first introduced to the glowering Tony, Tony tells him that he looks like he stepped out of a catalog. Cesar replies that Tony looks like a tramp. They then smile and shake hands.

The middle section of the movie is a tour de force. Without any dialogue whatsoever, it depicts the heist itself. The four thieves break into an apartment above the jewelry shop and break through the ceiling. Dassin directs the action with an obvious affection for physical labor. Watching the men work with drills is about as close as you will get to blue-collar labor on the wide screen during the 1950s.

Afterwards, Cesar makes the mistake of giving a diamond ring from the heist to a singer at a nightclub run by hoods who are Tony's foes. When he had been in prison, the owner had stolen his girl-friend Mado. When the rival hoods discover the ring, they make the connection between Cesar, who had shown up in the club with Tony and the other thieves, and the recent heist, news of which has been splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. The remainder of the film consists of a violent struggle to gain control of the loot.

"Rififi" was the first movie that Dassin made after a five year absence from the industry, forced upon him by the blacklist. It's success led to other jobs, all in Europe. Eventually he met and married Merlina Mercouri, who starred in another of his well-known movies, "Never On Sunday." Dassin moved to Greece and became a well-known figure on the Greek left, along with his wife. In recent years he has been involved with the campaign to return the Elgin marbles to Greece, a project Mercouri was very involved with until her death.