DU RIFIFI CHEZ LES HOMMES (Rififi, 1955) ***1/2 Jules Dassin's brilliant depiction of betrayal, revenge, redemption without joy, and irony. Jules, having been run out of the land of the free on political grounds, knew something of each. Auguste Le Breton pitched in on the script based upon his novel, but it's probably fair to say that the latter work was coloured as a Dassin statement. And it is. It's difficult to imagine a more comprehensive two-hour indictment of capitalism; it even corrupts the criminals! As a secondary concern it then turns out that the film is an utter technical masterpiece. The realism that already characterized Dassin's better work is brought to critical mass in the famous 28 minute robbery, a scene delivered without any dialogue or music. The next thing is that when the music returns, when cinematic devices return, Dassin/Breton sustain the horriffic level of suspense through to the darkest comedy of a conclusion; so dark that it's not even funny. It is not, of course, supposed to be. There may be something humorous about a talented artist giving American fascists the finger, and then being welcomed with an enormous budget and all of the cinematic talent in France (and England, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Greece)...but, it's really not funny. Jules got the performances that he both deserved and demanded from Jean Servais, Carl Mohner, Robert Manuel, Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, and Marie Sabouret. Dassin himself (billed as Perlo Vita) portrays a safecracker who folds under pressure and names names, and is then sadly, but summarily, executed by Servais. The reality behind the film is the legacy of Dassin executing that of Edward Dmytryk. Dassin lays the foundation for Dylan's law of gangsterism ("to live outside the law/you must be honest"), by demonstrating that to live outside the law you must live outside the law, and all that entails. It's a world that Dassin knows something about. It's a dark world inhabited by innumerable spirits of attractively evil undercurrents. And he says that money is the only one.
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