art and
consequence
For Jules Dassin, Dmytryk’s cooperation with the
conservative forces of American culture (Edward Dmytryk named Dassin as one of 26 communists in front of the Committee on Un-American Activities) meant, in some respects, a more-or-less
permanent dissociation with the US. Although US authorities had originally
allowed US distribution if Dassin were to renounce his past, he refused to do
so; yet his French film, Rififi,
distributed by a dummy company linked to United Artists, carried his name on
the credits, making him one of the first to break the Hollywood blacklist.
Based
on the novel, Du rififi chez les hommes,
by Auguste le Breton, the movie was first intended to be filmed by noted French
film director Jean-Pierre Melville, who when Dassin approached him about
directing the project, gave his blessing to the American—although Melville did
a film that shared much with Rififi, including
the basically soundless heist scene,
The Red Circle of 1970.
Although Dassin’s film might certainly be described as sharing many of
the tropes of the American film noir,
which Dassin had himself dabbled in the genre in his 1950 British film, Night and the City, Rififi, one might argue, is a mixed-genre affair. Although it
begins with a dark gabbling scene in which the recently paroled thief Tony le
Stéphanois (Jean Servais) is on a losing streak, it quickly shifts to a much
brighter work when Tony calls his friend, Swedish gangster, Jo le Suédois (Carl
Möhner), a man who seemingly dotes on his home life, his young son, Tonio (Dominique
Maurin), and his wife, Louise (Janine Darcey).
Indeed,
throughout much of the film it is Jo’s attachment to and engagement with his
son and wife that helps the film’s audience to allay their judgments against
Tony, Jo and their other two gangster friends. Tony, moreover, has taken the
rap for a previous heist, saving Jo from imprisonment, and the fact that when
called on for a loan, Jo not only immediately shows up but convinces his friend
to abandon the card game helps us to perceive the devotion between these men of
the street. Throughout the first half of Rififi,
at least, we are somewhat enchanted with the “rough-and-tumble” street life led
my these men, a life described in song by the local chanteuse, Viviane (Magali
Noël) in the entertaining title song by M. Philippe-Gérard and Jacques Larue.
Indeed, music (with a score by Georges Auric) is essential to this work, which
helps to lighten its darker elements.
His
re-encounter with his former lover, Mado (Marie Sabouret)—who has returned to
Paris, working in a club for the notorious gangster, Pierre Grutter (Marcell
Lupovici), who works out of his nightclub, L’Âge d’Or. Despite warnings from
Jo, Tony insists upon visiting the club to reclaim Mado, only to take her back
to his dismal room, force her to undress, and beat her with his belt.
That
scene temporarily shifts the tone of Dassin’s film once again, as we now must
perceive the brutal elements behind Tony and his associate’s friendly
wise-cracking exteriors. But we also accept Tony as a kind of seriously
betrayed man like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca,
who when he discovers that Mado has again disappeared abandons any alternative
fate to join with his old friends in a new heist.
For
that heist, the gang need a safecracker who they find in another Italian, the
dandyish macaroni, César le Milanais (played by Dassin himself), a figure about
it whom it is said: “There’s not a safe that can resist César and not a woman
that César can resist.”
Dassin
found the original novel, with its racist types of Arabs and northern Africans despicable, replacing them with figures from
various European countries. But the film cannot quite erase the misogyny at the
base of le Breton’s tale. Most of the women in this film are dangerous and
expendable. And César’s infatuation with the singer Louise is ultimately the
undoing of the successful heist.
Before
we know that for certain, however, Dassin takes us through the rehearsals of
the robbery and the heist itself with spellbinding detail, a kind of literate “how
to” pull off a major jewel robbery that outraged authorities in many countries,
including Mexico and Finland, where the film was banned. The Los Angeles Times declared the film to
be a “master class in breaking and entering….” In the US, the ever-censorious
Roman Catholic Legion of Decency spoke out against the movie. Yet it would be
difficult for anyone to deny Dassin’s mastery of direction in the tensely
silent episodes of the heist itself. Dassin quipped that the fact that he had
not yet mastered French perhaps led to his use of so little spoken language;
but any nitwit can see just how brilliant the decision was to cast the events
of the break in within the sounds only of an intrusive piano, the high-pitched
drills the robbers use to crack the safe, and the occasional grunts of their
labor. So tense is that long scene at the center of the film that when, as they
are about to escape the place, César returns momentarily to collect one last
diamond bauble for his new girlfriend, we feel almost cheated in our impatience
for their magical caper to a close.
But neither are the others. Mario is
killed, along with his wife, when she squeals about how to reach Tony. César,
the original stool-pigeon, is strung-up to be shot by Tony for his failure to
keep to “the code of silence.” And Tony himself, even though he now seems to be
attempting an action on the good side of the law by trying to save Jo’s Tonio
and destroy the unredeemable Grutters, is suddenly doomed.
In Dassin’s telling of the tale, one might
almost be tempted to see the heist as art, and the gang member’s deaths as the
undeserved consequences for having created it.
Los Angeles, August 10, 2014
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