What a splendidly strange career Jules Dassin (above, in the striped shirt) had. The son of a Jewish immigrant barber in Middletown, CT, he acted in Yiddish theater in Manhattan in the 1930s, was assisting Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood in 1941, directed his first feature, "Nazi Agent," the next year, landed on the HUAC blacklist in 1950, moved to France and won Best Director at Cannes with "Rififi" in 1955, met and married the larger-than-life Greek actress/activist/stateswoman Melina Mercouri in the mid-1960s (directing her in six films over the subsequent years), fled Greece in 1970 under threats from the ruling junta, returned four years later covered in glory, and lived out his final days running the Melina Mercouri Foundation, dedicated to returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. He died yesterday at 96. The country's Prime Minister praised him as "a first-generation Greek."
That's a hell of a long way from Middletown, CT.
Then there are the movies. Dassin was most celebrated (and imitated) for the silent heist sequence in "Rififi" and the much-loved, rather too cute "Never On Sunday" (1960), with Mercouri as an earthy hooker and Dassin himself as the American nerd who tries to reform her. Before the witch-hunt chased him out of Hollywood, though, the director was a key architect of post-WWII film noir. "The Naked City" (1948), a police procedural filmed almost as if it were a documentary, was a breakthrough in its use of realistic New York City locations, and "Brute Force" (1947) applied the noir template to the prison film genre, with a young, hard-bitten Burt Lancaster as an anti-hero con and Hume Cronyn as a sadistic guard. (Hume Cronyn! As they say in "Juno," I didn't know he had it in him.)
"Night and the City" (1948) may be the best thing Dassin ever did, though -- a weird, jagged London-set thriller featuring Richard Widmark as an increasingly desperate small-time hustler named Harry Fabian. At times "Night" plays like the last film on earth, and to the director that's probably what it felt like; he was condemned in absentia by HUAC and didn't return to Hollywood for 20 years. I praised "Night and the City" just last week when Widmark died. Now Dassin has left us. I do hope Googie Withers is feeling in the pink.
I couldn't find the "Rififi" robbery scene online, but here's a nice little snippet from the film to give you a taste of what Dassin could do. Sorry, no subtitles. None are needed, really.
