Summary
Shortly after serving a stretch in prison, an ageing crook Tony Le Stéphanois meets
up with his former comrades, Jo and Mario. The latter are planning to make a quick
snatch and grab raid on a jewellery shop and invite Tony to help them. Realising
this could be his last chance to make it big, Tony persuades his friends to attempt a
far bigger crime, involving breaking into the shop’s safe. They enlist an ace safe-cracker,
César, and begin to make meticulous preparations for the most ambitious crime of
their career...
Review
One of the few films of the film noir genre which can genuinely be described as a masterpiece,
Du rififi chez les hommes occupies a pivotal position in French cinema history.
It was the first truly successful attempt to import the American film noir genre into
French cinema and it provided the template for numerous other films, including some undisputed
gems.
The film was directed
by the American expatriate Jules Dassin, who turned to European film-making when he was
blacklisted in his own country after having been branded a Communist during the McCarthy
years. Arriving in Europe, Dassin had difficulty raising funds for his films, and
this explains why he was unable to afford a single star name for Du rififi chez les
hommes. (Dassin himself had to play the part of César - under the name
Perlo Vita - when the actor he hired dropped out at the last moment.) In spite of
the comparative low budget, Dassin’s creative flair and good fortune at securing a wealth
of talent on both sides of the camera enabled the director to create one of the most impressive
European films of the 1950s.
The French critic-director
François Truffaut described Du rififi chez les hommes as the best film noir
film he had seen, and few would disagree. The film’s blend of cynicism, hard-edged
realism, wry humour and sheer style puts it easily in the same league as the finest work
of that other master of the genre, John Huston, who had a considerable influence on Dassin.
Rififi is very nearly a remake of Huston's film noir masterpiece
The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
The film’s most famous
section is the jewel robbery itself, which takes up almost a full 30 minutes, filmed in
silence, without musical accompaniment. Dassin manages to create an almost unbearable
sense of tension as the robbery is staged with meticulous precision. It is a formula
which has been repeated many times since, from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge
to the recent Mission Impossible film, but seldom as captivating as in this film.
Somewhat less successful
is a cabaret scene near the start of the film in which the beautiful Magali Noël
sings a song which explains the film’s title (Rififi is a slang word for a violent
confrontation between rival gangs). The scene has been lampooned but does offer
a stylishly ironic parody to the film’s dramatic ending.
For many, the most memorable
scenes of the film are the location shots of Paris, which capture the banality and dangerous
intrigue of Parisian life with surprising depth and lucidity.
Although Du rififi
chez les hommes unleashed a craze for crime thrillers which would last for over a
decade in France, it received a severe backlash from many quarters. The film was
condemned for its amoral tone concerning drug taking and violence towards women, and the
famous jewel robbery scene caused the film to be banned in a number of countries because
of fears that it might help crooks to pull off similar crimes. None of this
affected its immense popularity at the time, and Jules Dassin was rewarded with the Best
Director award at Cannes.
© James Travers 2001
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