Topkapi

Melina Mercouri in Topkapi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1964).

Jules Dassin transplants the riveting heist mechanics of Rififi into this frothy Turkish confection. Melina Mercouri, Dassin's real-life wife, is a creature from another planet: a brassy, seductive jokestress with an insatiable desire for emeralds and every man in sight. One of those men is Peter Ustinov, chosen by Mercouri's gang of thieves as the "schmoe" who will help them get their equipment across the border into Turkey, and eventually drafted into their scheme in a fuller capacity. His bumbling charm complements Mercouri's batty confidence nicely, with Maximilian Schell acting as a sort of bland buffer. As much as the emerald heist tries to be the film's main set piece, that distinction must actually go to the huge wrestling bout that precedes it: about a hundred greased-up hairy guys trying to rip each other's faces off in a big muddy field, amidst great politeness and ceremony. Strange little film.

Night and the City

Richard Widmark in Night and the City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1950).



Clash of titans: Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki.



Richard Widmark and Googie Withers.


I'll always watch anything with Richard Widmark in it, but this is truly his finest hour and a half. Cheap hustler Harry Fabian is a piece of human wreckage with far too much energy and drive for his own good or anyone else's. There's nothing evil about him really, but nothing redeemable either, unless it's that he has the power to elicit concern for his well-being from persons with otherwise unclouded judgment. He is, in the memorable line spoken by Hugh Marlowe, "an artist without an art." (Speaking of Marlowe, his character, Adam Dunne, is supposed to be romantically interested in Gene Tierney's character, Mary Bristol, but he is so obviously, obviously gay that I can't imagine any audience today watching them interacting without uniformly dropped jaws.) Fabian races frantically through the film looking for an angle, a break, a mark, a loan, a place to hide, a chance to "be somebody." He gets so excited at his own pitches that he nearly vibrates to pieces, especially when the pitch fails with its intended target--such as Mary or his nemesis, clubowner Phil Nosseross, played by Francis L. Sullivan: Fabian strings Nosseross's wife Helen (Googie Withers) along in order to get her help backing his big wrestling promotion scheme, but Nosseross believes he is pursuing her in earnest, and sabotages his already-shaky venture. Nosseross takes sadistic pleasure in making it clear to Fabian that he's scuttled his enterprise, supplementing the emotional blow with a satisfied crash of the cymbals on a drum kit in the darkened nightclub.

Fabian's other nemesis is gangster-businessman Kristo (Herbert Lom), whose father Gregorius (retired champion Stanislaus Zbyszko, whom Dassin took great pains to seek out for the role, in his only screen appearance) is Fabian's ace in the hole: he takes him as a partner as insurance against Kristo striking out at him for competing with him in the wrestling market. Zbyszko looks like he's carved out of granite. When he moves and speaks, he's like one of those big tree guys in Lord of the Rings, only not as silly. His climactic fight with Mike Mazurki as "The Strangler" is four minutes of elemental theater at its most violent and primal.

For more on the film and its background, see the excerpt from Geoff Mayer's Encyclopedia of Film Noir at Noir of the Week.

Thieves' Highway

Richard Conte and Valentina Cortese in Thieves' Highway (dir. Jules Dassin, 1949).



Conte and Cortese in the noir-drenched streets of San Francisco.



Millard Mitchell, Jack Oakie, and Joseph Pevney.

I heart Jules Dassin. Thieves' Highway is the simplest of stories, adapted for the screen by A. I. "Buzz" Bezzerides from his novel Thieves' Market: gritty working folk race from the orchards of Fresno to the San Francisco produce markets with the year's first crop of golden delicious apples (never mind that in the parallel-dimension California of the story, this trip takes thirty-six hours). Crooked fruit merchant Lee J. Cobb makes life tough for Richard Conte and his fellow truckers, alternately aided and defied by whore-with-a-heart-of-you-know-what Valentina Cortese (one of the loves of Dassin's life). When Cortese plays tic-tac-toe on Conte's bare chest with her fingertips, it's as sensually frank as anything in European cinema of the period: she's like a minor carnal deity, and she blows Conte's stuck-up little priss of a fiancee (Barbara Lawrence) out of the water without even trying. All this creates the problem of how eventually to justify her relationship with Conte in a way that will satisfy the Breen Code, and the solution is naturally ridiculous: she's not actually a hooker, she's just a fortune teller. Right. This and the film's other brief concession to Breen--a scene where a policeman mildly admonishes Conte for taking the law into his own hands--were both tacked on by Fox producer Darryl Zanuck behind Dassin's back.

Millard Mitchell plays Conte's partner, and he's an absolutely compelling character, at once plain and complex, neither strong nor weak--just a man. There's nothing to him but realism. His truck goes out of control on the Altamont, and in the aftermath, hundreds of golden delicious apples cascade down the hill in the distance toward the foreground, little white specks of chaos. Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney stand by as witnesses, bewildered by the destructiveness of the universe and their own lives. During the shooting of this scene, Dassin told Pevney to zip up his jacket against the cold--a small, spontaneous moment that is essential to the mood of the moment, just as it is when Oakie looks at the apple that has somehow ended up in his hand, blinks in confusion, and throws it aside.

Rififi

Carl Möhner as Jo le Suedois and Jean Servais as Tony le Stéphanois in Rififi [Du rififi chez les hommes] (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955).



Dominique Maurin as Tonio le Suedois and Jean Servais as Tony le Stéphanois.



Perlo Vita (Jules Dassin) as Cesar le Milanais.



Magali Noël as Viviane.

Jules Dassin, in exile from Hollywood during the McCarthy years, made Rififi in France on a shoestring budget. He couldn't understand the dense argot of Auguste Le Breton's novel, so he had to have someone read it to him in order to adapt it for the screen. Le Breton was so upset at how much his book had been changed (for one thing, the necrophilia had been removed) that he pulled a gun on Dassin during their first meeting. They nevertheless became good friends.

I haven't read the book, but it's difficult to imagine that it could be any more of a masterpiece than the film. Its bleakness is a different kind from that of American noir, playing out as it does against an almost light-hearted background of camaraderie and daily life. Perhaps the major difference is in the portrayal of sexuality, which is not just franker, but less contaminated with gynephobic dread, more related to actual pleasure. And yet Dassin's American background distinguishes it from most French films in the genre as well: he's more in touch with the gestural and rhythmic specificity of US crime tropes, and he manages to transmit this sensibility to his actors. Dassin himself, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita, plays the suave safecracker Cesar le Milanais. It's a beautifully understated performance that is about as humbly enacted as you can imagine a semi-central role played by the director being. The anti-Orson-Welles.

The Naked City

Nail-biting extra in The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948).



Boy finds body floating in the East River.



Don Taylor.

Filmed entirely on location in New York City, Jules Dassin's big, hearty procedural borrows as much from newsreels and state-sponsored documentaries as from Italian neorealism. Producer Mark Hellinger's insistent voiceover is corny, but also an integral part of the movie's poignant tone of detached conviviality. Dassin has a knack for this effect, a mixture of generous sympathy for his characters and near-ironic fascination with the minutiae of incidental inflections and gestures that reduce subjects to caricatures: a heel on a bus whistles at a newspaper photo of the murdered model, and the woman standing behind him adopts a blankly bemused smirk; a pair of wrestlers pause in mid-embrace to answer police questions, their muscles frozen with stress throughout. It's obvious who the good guys and bad guys are, and which ones we're supposed to root for, but there is nevertheless a sense that none of the "eight million stories in the naked city" outweigh any of the others. We learn, for example, that shopkeepers and neighborhood children are fond of the murderous hoodlum Willie "the Harmonica" Garzah (Ted de Corsia), who looks down at the off-camera form of Don Taylor after knocking him out and chuckles, his face drenched with sweat, "That was a rabbit punch, copper--and it's strictly illegal."

Brute Force

Jack Overman, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and Burt Lancaster in Brute Force (dir. Jules Dassin, 1947).



Hume Cronyn wields his ... authority.



Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

As shot by cinematographer William Daniels (Queen Christina, The Shop Around the Corner, Winchester 73), the prison settings in Brute Force are some of the most oppressively gritty-looking surfaces ever committed to film. Even in Captain Munsey's office, with its arrogantly fascistic display of "high culture," you can almost smell stale sweat. Hume Cronyn's Munsey embodies a macho aesthetic that stands both in contrast and in parallel to Burt Lancaster's Joe Collins: both are figured by their muscles, Collins metaphorically and synecdochically (he's all muscle) and Munsey ironically and metonymically (his muscles are invisible when he's in uniform, but when revealed they are an index of his totalitarian abuse of power).

Dassin never judges his inmates for the crimes they have committed, even the ones they commit against other inmates. The fierce system of justice they apply is neither better nor worse than the one that put them behind bars: it is simply one more register of the film's noir determinism. The violence throughout is horrifying, especially when convicts use blowtorches to back a rat (the human kind) into a huge letterpress, and when another rat is strapped to a moving switching car and shot point blank.

John Hoyt's Spencer has my favorite line: "I wonder who Flossie is fleecing now."