Some movies are famous for a kiss; some for a battle scene. Jules Dassin’s great 1955 “Rififi” became a ’50s French crime movie legend for its half-hour robbery sequence, an excruciatingly tense scene set in a deserted Parisian jewelry store in the dark dead hours before the City of Light reawakens.
As writer and director Dassin builds the scene, his camera hovers over his four main characters — professional thieves drilling though the store ceiling from the apartment above, lowering themselves through the hole and then painstakingly cracking the jewelry store safe. Dassin records each detail with icy thoroughness: an umbrella dropped through the hole to catch debris, the drill bits that keep breaking. And in that murky little shop he sculpts a scene of such agonizing tension and near-documentary veracity that it made “Rififi” an international smash hit, won him a Cannes Best Director prize and inspired innumerable heist movies.Yet for younger audiences, “Rififi” may be an unseen classic, unavailable in good versions on video, starring actors unknown to them — Jean Servais and Carl Mohner. The new restored version from Rialto, now at The Music Box Theatre, should revive its reputation — and Dassin’s, too. The movie looks even better now, with its unforgettably gray and rainy monochrome Paris swallowed up in an atmosphere of tough-guy cynicism and mounting dread and doom. At the center is an archetypal man alone: wounded loner Tony, or “le Stephanois,” played by Servais, an actor with a ravaged face and the mournful, haunted eyes of a French Humphrey Bogart.
What may have looked to some like French smut in 1955 now seems more realistic — even slightly romantic. “Rififi” (“Trouble”) was based on the novel “Du Rififi Chez les Hommes” by co-scripter Auguste le Breton; Dassin disliked the book. But, as a movie, it fuses two great film traditions: American film noir and ’30s French poetic realism. Marcel Carne (“Children of Paradise”) was the master of poetic realism, and Carne’s brilliant production designer, Alexandre Trauner, also designed “Rififi.” There’s another echo: Besides recalling Bogart, “Rififi’s” Tony strongly resembles the doomed loners Jean Gabin played in those same ’30s Carne-Trauner classics (“Port of Shadows,” “Le Jour se Leve”).
Here, Tony is a pro thief, returning from a five-year stretch in prison, his health broken, to find his world changed, his rep gone and his woman, Mado (Marie Sabouret), now the chippie of his unscrupulous rival, “L’Age d’Or” cabaret owner Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici).
Tony took the fall to keep his young buddy, Joe “The Swede” (Mohner), out of jail because Joe has a wife (Janine Darcey) and a young son (Dominique Maurin). Now good-hearted Joe wishes to repay him by bringing Tony into a job with his other pal, wise-cracking pimp Mario Farrati (Robert Manuel). But Tony rejects their crude scheme — breaking a display window in broad daylight and running off with some loot — for a more complex caper that requires the services of top safecracker Cesar, or “le Milanese,” a little womanizing mustachioed dandy, played by Dassin under the pseudonym “Perlo Vita.”
“Rififi” has three acts: the planning of the heist, the heist itself, and its bloody aftermath, when the Grutter gang wages war on Tony to steal the proceeds. But though the ending bloodily conveys the message “Crime does not pay,” it’s also tragic: a furious quest in which anti-hero Tommy becomes, briefly, a hero. “Rififi’ was the first foreign film I ever saw, at age 9, and I never forgot the heist scene or the incredible climax of the last act, with Tony driving recklessly through Paris streets, bare black branches racing dizzily overhead.
The major influences on “Rififi” include many American noirs and especially two great earlier heist movies: Raoul Walsh’s “High Sierra,” with Bogart, co-written by John Huston from a W.R. Burnett novel, and Huston’s 1950 “The Asphalt Jungle,” from another Burnett novel — the latter so close to “Rififi” they play like variations on a theme. (So does Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 racetrack robbery thriller “The Killing.”)
Of those classics, Dassin’s film is the most perfect example of the whole genre. His inspiration was to make the robbery dominate the movie, in the semidocumentary tradition of his 1949 New York crime thriller, “Naked City.” That was partly a desperation move because he was unsure of the material, and desperation underlies the film “Rififi” almost as much as it does the robbery. Like Tony, Dassin had been away for five years — banished from movies and America, after having been named as an ex-Communist and blacklisted.
Though a huge hit, “Rififi” was considered “dirty” in 1955, mostly for its brief nudity and the heroin addiction of co-villain Remi Grutter (Robert Hossein). Like most noirs, “Rififi” dwells on the seamy side: the lives of thieves, prostitutes and killers, in the streets, in barren apartments, a deserted half-built villa on the outskirts of Paris and the vast gaudy nightclub run by the Grutters. But what may have looked to some like French smut in 1955 now seems more realistic — even slightly romantic.
Dassin probably sees obvious parallels between Paris’ underworld and his own movie milieu, another maze of treachery and malice — and he vents his leftist politics in the social contrasts between the gangs. The four freelance robbers are ordinary guys, whom we like because of their loyalty and professionalism. The corrupt and decadent Grutters are bourgeois mobsters, sharks in fancy suits. When the caper begins to crack, it’s because of womanizer Cesar, who can’t resist giving a stolen diamond ring to the Grutters’ sexy chanteuse, Magali Noel.
There’s also a touch that clearly resonates with Dassin’s blacklist grief: the movies’ unvarnished hatred of informants. Tony’s gang won’t rat on each other; by contrast, crime boss Pierre Grutter is a police spy. And when Tony confronts the manacled Cesar, muttering that he likes him and it’s too bad — but he knows the rules and has to die — Dassin as Cesar gives a silent, sad assent as revealing as Elia Kazan’s and Budd Schulberg’s defense of informing in 1954’s “On the Waterfront.”
After “Rififi,” Dassin became a major international filmmaker, finally settling in Greece with his actress wife, Melina Mercouri. He made another superb heist thriller, the exotic and comic “Topkapi,” set in Istanbul, starring Mercouri and Peter Ustinov. Sadly, though, he never made another film noir — unless you count “Uptight,” his 1968 black revolutionary remake of John Ford’s “The Informer.”
Even so, “Rififi” shows him as a true master of noir, an artist of tension. No matter how many heists you’ve seen, how many gangs you’ve watched fall apart or how many aging crooks you’ve seen walk up a mean street to a violent destiny, “Rififi” never loses its ruthless grace and force. As you watch the 30 annihilating minutes of that matchless jewel robbery, then you’ll know how it feels to be in the depths of noir, on the darker side of midnight in the hands of a blacklisted master.
`RIFIFI’
(star)(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Jules Dassin; written by Dassin, Rene Wheeler, Auguste le Breton (dialogue), based on the novel “Du Rififi Chez les Hommes’ by le Breton; photographed by Philippe Agostini; edited by Robert Dwyre; production designed by Alexandre Trauner; art direction by Auguste Copelier; music by Georges Auric; song (“Rififi”) by Jacques Larue (lyrics) & Philippe-Gerard (music); executive producers Henri Berard, Pierre Cabaud, Rene Bezard. A Rialto Pictures release of a Gaumont production; opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre; Running time: 1:58. No MPAA rating (adult: brief nudity and drug use).
THE CAST
Tony “Le Stephanois” ……. Jean Servais
Joe “The Swede” ……. …. Carl Mohner
Mario Farrati ………….. Robert Manuel
Cesar “Le Milanese” Perlo Vita (Jules Dassin)
Mado ………………….. Marie Sabouret
Pierre Grutter …………. Marcel Lupovici
Remi Grutter …………… Robert Hossein
Viviane ……………….. Magali Noel
