Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)
Directed by Jules Dassin

Film Review

Jules Dassin's film noir masterpiece Du rififi chez les hommes occupies a pivotal place in French cinema. Not only did it mark a definitive turning point in the development of the film policier, bringing far greater realism and viciousness to a genre which had hitherto been pretty soft-boiled, but it also helped to pave the way for the French New Wave with its extensive use of real locations, raw naturalistic edge and total lack of big name actors.  There had been some notable thrillers prior to this one - Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) being the one most deserving of praise - but it was the success of Du rififi chez les hommes which established the policier as a major genre in France, one that would dominate French cinema for over two decades and inspire some of the country's most talented filmmakers.  The pinnacle of French film noir, Dassin's film would have a wide-ranging and lasting impact and is still considered one of the greatest examples of its genre.

Prior to this career highpoint, Jules Dassin had distinguished himself in Hollywood with a series of what are now considered landmark film noir thriller-dramas - Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves' Highway (1949). What set Dassin's films apart from other films noirs of this period is their arresting near-documentary realism.  Dassin was greatly influenced by Italian neo-realism - films such as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) - and sought to bring the same mordant authenticity to his own films (partly as a cathartic reaction to the terminally anodyne films he had been forced to make for MGM).  The anti-Communist paranoia which Senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters unleashed in the late 1940s put paid to Dassin's career just when he was emerging as one of Hollywood's greatest creative talents.  Denounced as a Communist by director Edward Dmytryk when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dassin found his name added to the rapidly growing Hollywood blacklist and was unable to find work in his own country.  Having completed Night and the City (1950) in England, he moved to France, but his efforts to continue his career were thwarted by the long-arm of Hollywood.   Within weeks of being hired to direct Fernandel in L'Ennemi public no 1 (1953) he was dismissed after the cast and crew were intimidated by representatives of the American film industry.  A similar thing happened when Dassin went to Rome to begin work on an adaptation of Giovanni Verga's Mastro don Gesualdo.   Dassin's ill-treatment by the Hollywood mafia provoked a furore in the French press, and this is what ultimately led producer Henri Bérard to approach him to direct what would be his most celebrated film.

Bérard's motivation for choosing Dassin was somewhat opportunistic.  He was looking for someone to adapt Auguste Le Breton's popular crime novel Du rififi chez les hommes but was reluctant to hire a French director because the villains of the story were black North Africans.  Mindful of prevailing tensions in Algeria, Bérard considered making the villains Americans, and who better to direct the film than a maverick American film maker who would have a natural antipathy towards America?   Reluctant to be drawn into a futile vendetta against his own country, Dassin suggested that the villains should be French, something that have never occurred to Bérard.

Initially, Dassin was reluctant to make the film.  When he first attempted to read Le Breton's novel he could make no sense of it at all, since it was written in a French Parisian argot which he could not understand.  When the novel was translated to him, he took an instant dislike to it and was repulsed by its overt racism and references to necrophilia.  However, with no other work coming his way, he agreed to make the film (dispensing with most of Le Breton's novel as he did so), on what turned out to be a minuscule budget.  With a mere 200 thousand dollars at his disposal, Dassin was unable to hire any big name actors and it was only through good will that he secured the services of such talents as set design Alexandre Trauner, composer Georges Auric and cinematographer Philippe Agostini, all of whom worked for a fraction of their normal fee.  Dassin himself was paid very little, although he secured a percentage of the film's profits.

It has often been commented that the casting of Jean Servais in the leading role is inspired, but this was the result of a chance encounter between the actor and the director.  Servais had once been a major star of French cinema but his career had waned in recent years through alcoholism.  The actor's world-weary demeanour and faded rugged beauty, qualities that instantly evoked both repugnance and sympathy, made him the ideal choice for the part of the ageing gangster Tony le Stéphanois.   It is Servais's gripping performance that most gives Du rififi chez les hommes its burning intensity and stark humanity, and it is through this film that the actor enjoyed an immediate boost to his career.   The supporting roles went to virtual unknowns, although their contributions were also of the highest standard.  Dassin was compelled to cast himself in the role of César le Milanais (under the pseudonym Perlo Vita) when  the actor he had chosen for the part turned out to be unavailable.  It is interesting that Dassin plays the part of the gang's traitor, and does so in a way that evokes something of the pain and darkness he must have felt when he was himself betrayed by Dmytryk a few years previously.  Robert Hossein appears in a small role (controversially playing a drug addict), not long before he became a major star in French cinema.  As the film's stunning femme fatale, the actress Magali Noël had her big break, which would lead her to be cast by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita (1960) and two subsequent films.  It is Noël who sings the film's notorious (and often unfairly reviled) musical number, which explains what the slang word Rififi means - a violent confrontation between rival gangs.

It is not possible to discuss Du rififi chez les hommes without reference to its much-vaunted heist sequence, one that has been emulated endlessly since - most successfully by Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Cercle rouge (1970) - but never improved upon.  The scene, which lasts twenty-four minutes, is played without any dialogue or music and shows in meticulous detail every step in the jewel robbery, including the one fatal error which leads inevitably to the gangsters' downfall.  Composer Georges Auric was incredulous when Dassin insisted that the scene should have no music and went off and wrote a piece to accompany it.  When Dassin showed Auric the scene with and without the music the musician concurred with the director - the sequence was far more effective without music.  It is this scene which earned the film a certain notoriety in the press and led it to be banned in some countries through fear that it was providing a training manual for crooks.  In his defence, Dassin insisted that his intention was not to inspire the criminal fraternity, but rather to show how inordinately difficult it is to pull off a successful robbery.  This cut no ice (excuse the pun) with the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, which predictably branded the film as dangerously immoral (which is odd when you consider that all of the protagonists come to a very sticky end).

Within a month of the film's release in France in 1955, Jules Dassin was invited to Cannes to receive the Best Director Award, the highest accolade of his career.  Having proven to be an immediate box office hit in France, Du rififi chez les hommes enjoyed even greater commercial and critical success on its international release, particularly in America where it was shown in an English dubbed version under the title Rififi... Means Trouble.  The film inspired a series of inferior French thrillers with the word Rififi in the title, including: Du rififi chez les femmes (1959), Du rififi à Tokyo (1962) and Du rififi à Paname (1966).  Although Dassin would doubtless have been able to resume his Hollywood career after the success of Rififi, he chose instead to remain in Europe, where he would make some of his most original films - Celui qui doit mourir (1957), Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964), the latter being a highly amusing parody of Rififi.

As incisive and enjoyable as Jules Dassin's later films are, none of these can compare with the sheer stylistic brilliance of Du rififi chez les hommes, his greatest film, which would provide both the template for many subsequent French crime thrillers and an impetus to the French New Wave.   This is film noir at its most perfect, a fascinating but gruelling excursion into the Parisian underworld, vividly conveying the sordid viciousness and brutal precariousness of the milieu as experienced by its twisted inhabitants, but with a poetry and humanity that is as keenly felt as a sudden sharp lash of the whip across the face.  Rififi is not just a marvellously constructed heist movie.  It is a dark and astute character study which is driven by old-fashioned notions of honour and betrayal, crafted by a man who knew precisely what these words meant and who would bear the scars of an ill-deserved betrayal to the end of his days.

Film Synopsis

Not long after his release from prison, ageing crook Tony Le Stéphanois meets up with his former criminal associates, Jo and Mario.  The latter are planning to make a quick snatch and grab raid on a Parisian jeweller's 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 more ambitious heist, which involves breaking into the shop's safe.  They enlist an ace safe-cracker, César, and begin to make meticulous preparations for the most daring crime of their career.  The shop's burglar alarm offers the greatest challenge, but Tony finds a way to disable this with a fire extinguisher.  The robbery goes exactly as planned and the gang makes off with a quarter of a million francs in jewellery.  But just when it appears that Tony and his friends have succeeded, one of the gang makes a small but fatal mistake.  Motivated by greed and revenge, a rival gang moves in for the kill...