Jo le Suédois (Carl Möhner) and Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) plan a big-time heist in Jules Dassin masterpiece
RIFIFI (DU RIFIFI CHEZ LES HOMMES) (Jules Dassin, 1955)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 2-8
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
After being blacklisted in Hollywood, American auteur Jules Dassin (The Naked City, Brute Force) headed to France, where he was hired to adapt Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, a crime novel by Auguste le Breton that he made significant changes to, resulting in one of the all-time-great heist films. After spending five years in prison (perhaps not uncoincidentally, Dassin had not made a film in five years after Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle declared him a communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee), Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) gets out and hooks up again with his old protégé, Jo le Suédois (Carl Möhner), who has settled down with his wife (Janine Darcy) and child (Dominique Maurin) for what was supposed to be a life of domestic tranquility. Joined by Mario Farrati (Robert Manuel), a fun-loving bon vivant with a very sexy girlfriend (Claude Sylvain), and cool and calm safecracker César le Milanais (Dassin, using the pseudonym Perlo Vita), the crew plans a heist of a small Mappin & Webb jewelry store on the Rue de Rivoli. Not content with a quick score, Tony lays the groundwork for a major take, but greed, lust, jealousy, and revenge get in the way in Dassin’s masterful film noir. The complex plan gets even more complicated as César falls for Viviane (Magali Noël), a singer who works at the L’Âge d’Or nightclub, which is owned by Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who has taken up with Tony’s former squeeze, Mado (Marie Sabouret), and is trying to save his brother, Louis Grutter (Pierre Grasset), from a serious drug habit. (The club is named for Luis Buñuel’s 1930 film, which featured the same production designer as Rififi, Alexandre Trauner.)
A gang of thieves try to pull off an impossible heist in RIFIFI
As the plot heats up, things threaten to explode in Dassin’s thrilling black-and-white film, which takes a series of unexpected twists and turns as it goes from its remarkably tense, absolutely masterful music- and dialogue-free heist scene to a wild climax — and even includes a sly reference to what should happen to such rats as the men who gave him up to HUAC. Composer Georges Auric insisted on writing a soundtrack for the heist scene — which was a direct influence on such films as Mission: Impossible and was banned in several countries for being too much of a primer on how to pull off a robbery — but after Dassin showed him cuts with and without the score, Auric agreed that only natural sound was necessary for those critical thirty minutes. As a bonus, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency officially condemned the film for its depiction of sex and violence, which features a hard-to-watch beating of a woman. Dassin, who went on to make another of the great caper movies, 1964’s Topkapi, was named Best Director at Cannes for the low-budget Rififi, a true gem of a film, which is playing September 2-8 at Film Forum in a new restoration.