Rififi

I love a good caper movie, in fact, it may be my favorite genre. The template is almost always the same--a disparate group comes together to pull off an almost impossible job, usually a bank robbery or jewelry store heist. Some of the group may know each other, but there are usually strangers that must learn to trust each other. Their ingenuity pulls off the robbery, but some human weakness, usually for women, but sometimes just greed, messes everything up and they are either captured or die, one by one, with one of the gang betraying another. It's kind of a microcosm of the view of life embodied by the pessimist, but with a moral overtone: there are no easy ways to get rich quickly.

But the moral viewpoint is usually wrong. When Rififi was released in 1955, it was criticized by the morally superior. The Catholic church gave it a condemned rating, and some said it was a primer for how to rob a jewelry store. But writer and director Jules Dassin disagreed, pointing out that, in fact, his film showed just how hard it was to rob a jewelry store. Nevertheless, all the hard work goes for naught, and even from the first frames of film, the viewer knows it. The fun is watching them accomplish the feat, and then waiting for them to screw up.

This film was released about the same time as The Asphalt Jungle, and these are the two best examples of the genre. But Rififi has a much more interesting back story. Dassin had been blacklisted and fled the U.S. But the long arm of McCarthyism affected him even in Europe, and he didn't find work for five years. Finally he was offered to do the film version of a pulp novel by a French writer, and even though Dassin hated the book (it was full of anti-Arab racism) he did it anyway. He wrote the screenplay in six days, and even played the role of Cesar the Milanese safecracker (the actor hired didn't sign a contract in time). Dassin took a small salary, due to his political circumstances, but took a percentage of the profits, which were great (the film, despite the efforts of the witch-hunting element in American society, did good business in art-houses in the U.S.). Dassin won a directing award at the Cannes film festival.

The story concerns a foursome that team to rob a jewelry store. Jean Servais is Tony the Stephanois, who is just out of prison. He is gaunt and grim, and Servais gives a terrific performance as a man who is almost the walking dead. In a shocking scene (for the times) he visits his old girlfriend, who dumped him after he went to prison and took up with the owner of a nightclub where she is a "hostess." She accompanies him back to his place, where he makes her strip and beats her with a belt. This is off-camera, but jarring nonetheless.

Tony and his associates--Jo the Swede, who has a wife and son, Mario, a garrulous Italian, and Cesar, who has an eye for the ladies, try to figure out to get past the store's alarm system. Then comes the scene that the film is celebrated for, a thirty-minute sequence that is without dialogue or music, in which they break in by digging a hole in the ceiling above, and then disable the alarm with fire-extinguisher foam. It's a breathtaking sequence that has been copied many times since.

Cesar's eye for the ladies, just like Sam Jaffee's weakness for young girls in The Asphalt Jungle, dooms the enterprise. It's a compelling scene when Tony confronts Cesar, who has given up Mario. "You know what happens when you break the rules," Tony tells him, and knowing Dassin's situation--he refused to name names and suffered the consequences, is moving. Dassin, as Cesar, closes his eyes and accepts his fate.

Rififi (the title is a word meaning fighting or brawling) is a gem of cinema. The only misstep is a clunky musical number with a title song, that seems to have been inserted to explain what the title means (it made me think of Veronica Lake's magic/music number in This Gun For Hire--what was it with inserting musical numbers into gritty crime dramas in those days?)

When Elia Kazan won an honorary Oscar a few years ago, there were many that were outraged. Kazan, who had a magnificent directorial career, stained his reputation by turning evidence against friends to the HUAC committee. Many hoped that Dassin would one day win an Oscar, but sadly, he did not.