Jules Dassin

Biography: life and films

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, on 18th December 1911, one of eight children of a Russian Jewish barber. After graduating from high school in the Bronx, he started work as an actor with the Yiddish Proletarian Theater in New York, but he soon realised that his future lay not in acting but in directing. After a spell as an assistant director at RKO, he was hired by MGM. There, he began his directing career with the short The Tell-Tale Heart (1941), a startlingly expressionistic adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed this with a number of routine feature films for MGM, beginning with the spy thriller Nazi Agent (1942), which starred Conrad Veidt.

Dassin made his breakthrough when he moved to Universal in 1946. There, working closely with producer Mark Hellinger, he would direct some of the most memorable film noir dramas in American cinema, distinguished by their realism and modernity. These included: Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Thieves' Highway (1949). For his next film, Dassin was sent to England to direct Night and the City (1950), a distinctive thriller fashioned as an expressionist nightmare in London's murky underworld.

Jules Dassin's fortunes took a dramatic turn for the worse in the early 1950s. In 1951, he was denounced by director Edward Dmytryk to the House Committee on Un-American Activities for involvement with the Communist Party. Although Dassin was not requested to testify, he ended up on the Hollywood blacklist and found himself without work. (In fact, he had briefly belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s, believing that leftwing politics would help ordinary Americans during the Great Depression.) With no hope of finding work in America, Dassin moved to France in 1953.

It was whilst living in France that Dassin would make what was to become his most enduring and best known film, Du rififi chez les hommes, a.k.a. Rififi (1955). The film was an enormous critical and commercial success, establishing Dassin's career in Europe. Critic François Truffaut described Rififi as the best film noir he had ever seen. This film is famous for its 25 minute long heist sequence which takes place without any dialogue, a sequence which has been emulated in many films since. Rififi earned Dassin the Best Director award at Cannes in 1955.

Dassin's next film, Celui qui doit mourir (1957), was a complete break with what went before - a political morality tale inspired by the life and death of Christ. This film was his first collaboration with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he would marry in 1966 and who would appear in a further six of his films. Mercouri would later give up acting to pursue a career as a politician, becoming Greece's Minister of Culture in 1981.

Never on a Sunday (1960) would be Dassin's biggest commercial success. In this film, one of the few films made in Greece to become an international hit, he starred opposite Mercouri. The popularity of this film allowed Dassin to return to the United States. There, he resumed his filmmaking career with Topkapi (1964), a popular caper movie set in Istanbul, which won an Oscar for its star, Peter Ustinov. In 1967, Dassin directed a stage version of Never on Sunday on Broadway, winning a Tony Award.

Dassin's subsequent career followed a marked downward trajectory, with the director never again repeating his earlier successes. The decline began with 10.30 PM Summer (1966), a pretentious adaptation of a Marguerite Duras novel and Up Tight (1968), a misguided remake of John Ford's The Informer (1935). Dassin ended his career with the lacklustre melodrama Circle of Two, which proved to be a box office failure.

Dassin had three children from his first marriage (to Beatrice Launer), one of whom was the popular singer Joe Dassin, who died in 1980 from a heart attack. From the mid-1950s, Dassin had a great interest in Greek culture and politics. With his wife Melina Mercouri, he opposed the Greek military junta in the late 1960s and would campaign tirelessly for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece. After a short illness, Dassin died on 31st March 2008 in Athens, Greece, aged 96.

Filmography

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