RIFIFI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The greatest heist film ever made screens at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox in the Summer 2017 series "Panique: French Crime Classics" and is also available on a gorgeous Criterion Collection Blu-Ray/DVD

Rififi (1955)
Dir. Jules Dassin
Scr. Dassin & René Wheeler
Nvl. Auguste Le Breton
Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner,Robert Manuel,
Jules Dassin, Janine Darcey, Magali Noël, Claude Sylvain

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The major set piece of this extraordinary French crime film by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin is a breathless thirty-minute-long heist sequence that is shot with natural sound, no dialogue and no music.

It's pure cinema!

It's also one of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful scenes in movie history. We've come to know the characters, we understand the high stakes for all of them if they don't pull off the big steal and worst of all, we're well aware of what will happen if they're caught - especially the desperate old man, Tony "le Stéphanois" (Jean Servais). He's just served five years of hard time for a heist gone wrong and his only choices in life amount to petty crime, gambling and/or getting caught and being tossed back into the hoosegow until he's dead (or as close to dead as he'll ever get).

These men are criminals, but we want them to succeed. It's post-war France and the opportunities for men who've known only one way to survive are pretty much non-existent. They live by a strict code of honour and they'll steal, but they won't kill (at least until they are pushed to the limit to do so). There's clearly honour amongst these thieves (save for the slimy, greasy, lazy borderline pimps who weasel into the proceedings later on) and we never once feel like there are viable options for our main characters.

And so, we follow them willingly and almost complicitously into the breach - an insanely daring heist that requires split-second timing, impeccable teamwork and one hell of a massive whack of horseshoes worth of luck stuffed up their respective and collective keisters.

If the heist was only thing Rififi had going for it, there's no doubt the picture would be highly regarded, but that its bookends are as solid and compelling as all get out place Dassin's movie on s pedestal that holds some of the greatest crime pictures ever made. The manner in which Dassin shoots the heist is completely in keeping with his approach to the rest of the movie. Shooting almost exclusively on location captures the naturalistic feeling of the film's hard-boiled tale. Much like his groundbreaking American crime pictures (Naked City, Brute Force) which, broke American cinema out of the studio bound mould and took them onto the streets a la the Italian neorealist movement, Rififi is a glorious blend of stylized frissons within the framework of life itself.

Dassin, of course, had a tiny budget and little time to shoot the film, so he personally scouted all the locations in order to get a strong visual sense in advance to allow for impeccable planning. In many ways, Rififi is a model picture for independent, low budget approaches that are still infused with the highest degree of production value. Within Dassin's impeccable eye for visual detail, he's doubly blessed by working with the genius production designer Alexandre Trauner who manages to deliciously goose the look of the film.

Narratively, the tale is tough-minded and even romantic, but the attention to the details of the lives of the criminals and the heist itself (including the meticulous planning) give it the crank it needs to always keep us glued to the screen. As well, there's no overwhelming (and annoying) sense of the proceedings ever diving into moralistic waters. We believe in these men AND their criminal intent. We want them to succeed and if things go wrong and all becomes futile, Dassin sets the picture up in such a way that we're going to feel and care deeply about whatever plight the characters suffer. It helps, also, that the casting is impeccable - especially Servais as the world weary "le Stéphanois", Dassin himself as the funny, sprightly and finally, almost tragic figure of the ladies' man, as well as the other disparate and memorable members of the team.

The importance of Rififi as both dazzling entertainment, but as well, its place in laying the foundations for crime pictures that followed as well as the whole French New Wave that would come a few years later is, frankly, incalculable. All its historical significance aside, it's one hell of a good show! Rififi is brutal, harrowing and darkly funny and it seldom got better than this. The dames are dames, its heroes noble and the villains are pure filth. Sure, the movie trades in on the tropes of the genre, but does so expertly within its overwhelming naturalism that nothing ever feels cliched and is, in fact, far fresher than most films made today.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Rififi screens at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox in the Summer 2017 series "Panique: French Crime Classics" and is also available on a gorgeous Criterion Collection Dual Format Blu-Ray/DVD release complete with New 2K digital restoration, my favourite uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a very inspirational interview with director Jules Dassin, set design drawings by art director Alexandre Trauner, still, trailer, an optional English-dubbed soundtrack (especially handily for additional screenings to just study Dassin's visuals and a terrific essay by Jim Hoberman.

UPTIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Blacklisted 40s Noir Director updates John Ford classic "The Informer" from the Irish "troubles" to post-Martin Luther King assassination Cleveland.

Uptight (1968)
Dir. Jules Dassin
Scr. Jules Dassin, Ruby Dee, Julian Mayfield
Nvl. Liam O'Flaherty
Starring: Julian Mayfield, Max Julien, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Raymond St. Jacques, Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Silvera, Juanita Moore, Robert DoQui

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Liam O'Flaherty's classic 1925 novel was the basis for his cousin John Ford's immortal 1935 film The Informer, the simple, powerful story about an alcoholic cellar-dwelling brute in the Rebel-cause who betrays his best-friend to the authorities during the Irish War of Independence. Uptight is a 1968 remake by blacklisted film noir director Jules Dassin (Brute Force, The Naked City, Night and the City) faithfully transplanting O'Flaherty's story to the civil rights revolutionary movement in America by replacing the burgeoning Irish Republican Army with a fictionalized rendering of the Black Panthers in Cleveland.

To say Uptight is a forgotten masterwork of 60s/70s American Cinema would not, in spite of its lower-budget pedigree and a few bits of roughness around the edges, be an exaggeration. It's an endlessly fascinating, evocative take on the tragic implications of Martin Luther King's assassination amongst African Americans who chose violence to meet the injustices of the "Ruling" class, diametrically opposing King's peaceful actions (which, of course, were met with violence).

Dassin, the American son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, had long-dreamed of setting the book in just this fashion and miraculously managed to successfully pitch the property to Paramount Pictures during the rich "Easy Riders Raging Bulls" period wherein the artist/inmates were briefly allowed to run the studio/asylums. Alas, the film appears to have been barely released and has indeed been largely forgotten.

Dassin's greatest successes as a filmmaker were to carefully blend legendary producer Mark Hellinger's heavy-duty combo of gritty location work with carefully matched studio art direction. Fleeing the House of Un-American Activities for his involvement in the Communist Party, he carried on this same tradition in Europe and made the heist film Rififi, inarguably one of the greatest crime pictures in the history of French Cinema.

With Uptight, Dassin assembled an absolute dream team with impeccable results.

In addition to a cast of America's greatest African American actors of the time (or any time), Dassin was blessed with a rich script he co-wrote with the film's Black stars Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield, stunningly gritty cinematography on the mean streets of Cleveland by Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront, 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker), first-rate production design by Alexandre Trauner (Children of Paradise, Port of Shadows, The Man Who Would Be King) that astonishingly matched studio sets with the locations, the expert cutting of editor Robert Lawrence (Spartacus, El Cid, Fiddler on the Roof), costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge (1974's The Great Gatsby, Network, The Rose) and last, but never, ever least, a GREAT musical score by Booker T. Jones, including his massive 1962 Stax Records hit "Green Onions". (If you don't know Jones, or at the very least, Booker T. and the MGs, then you know NOTHING.)

Eschewing the redemptive approach chosen by John Ford and his screenwriter Dudley Nichols in 1935, Dassin and team use O'Flaherty's underlying literary material to drag us through a dramatically tragic and stylistically (albeit borderline) example of neorealism which is shaken (not stirred) with dollops of expressionism. Other than a sentimental death for a traitor on the steps of a church and the updated setting, Uptight is strangely familiar to the Ford picture (at least on a simple narrative level).

After a gorgeously edited montage of the immediate Memphis aftermath to King's assassination (all in glorious, grainy colour) and expertly blended with scenes introducing the anger of the Cleveland Black-Panther-like revolutionaries, we plunge immediately into the familiar tale (which won Victor McLaglen his 1936 Best Acting Oscar as the doomed informer Gypo Nolan). His counterpart in Dassin's film is Tank (Julian Mayfield, making a phenomenal acting debut, ignored not only by the 1969 Oscars, but like the film, most everyone).

The burly booze-hound is drunkenly responsible for a major screw-up during an arms heist. His best friend Johnny Wells (Max Julien) is identified as the ringleader and murderer of a security guard. Johnny's parter Rick (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) and head revolutionary B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques, adorned stylishly in a Nehru jacket) are so disgusted with Tank's repeated incompetence that they kick him out of the organization.

Since Tank lost his job at a steel mill, Laurie (Ruby Dee), the love of his life is forced to prostitute herself. Cut loose by the revolutionaries, he's got little to live for and is especially susceptible to the influence of the silver-tongued gay police informant Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne). Seeing the reward money for Johnny Wells as a way out for himself and Laurie, Tank does the unthinkable and rats out his old friend.

Ah, but just one little drink is needed.

Instead of using the dough as a nest-egg for flight and a better life for Laurie, Tank is pumped up into thinking that for once in his life, he can be seen as a "big man", and he trolls from bar to bar, buying multiple rounds for himself and all his "friends". All he has left is $20 to put in a collection plate during Johnny's funeral (his old pal's been gunned down by the cops thanks to Tank's loose lips).

The inevitable demise awaits him - not on the steps of a church, but upon the slag heaps of a steel mill.

The picture is a heartbreaker, to be sure, but even though it's a period piece, Uptight is as resonant to race relations in America today as it was in the 60s/70s. A good part of this is thanks to Dassin's dazzling direction. The opening heist scene is tension-filled and reminiscent of the "silent" heist in Rififi, the dirty streets of Cleveland seem as foul as those in The Naked City and the violence as raw and unyielding as that seen in Brute Force. The locations and production design, so beautifully lit, pulsate with realism of the neo and expressionistic variety - everything from tenement back alleys to a shuttered old bowling alley (and, of course, the slag heaps of Cleveland). You'll also be treated to a horrifying distorted mirror sequence where Tank drunkenly stumbles amidst freakish bourgeois White folk - a thoroughly unforgettable series of shots.

Dassin's montages are also a thing of foul beauty. Not unlike Slavko Vorkapich's legendary montages, they're infused with the weight of social injustice and the sadness inherent in a world where slavery is still slavery, but with a different name - the status quo, a world in which one of the film's characters opines: "a nigger is still just a nigger".

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Uptight is available on a bare-bones Blu-Ray from Olive Films, but the transfer gorgeously reproduces the film's glorious grain and dapples of saturated colour. Given that most people have not seen this important work about the African American revolutionary movement (rooted in Irish literature and remade from a great John Ford masterpiece), it's well worth buying - for those who care about cinema.


If you buy UPTIGHT or any of other related Jules Dassin/John Ford films directly from the Amazon links below, you'll be supporting the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

RIFIFI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Greatest Heist Film Ever Made - Bar None!!! Available on Criterion Collection Blu-Ray

Rififi (1955) *****
Dir. Jules Dassin
Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner,
Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Janine Darcey, Magali Noël

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The major set piece of this extraordinary French crime film by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin is a breathless thirty-minute-long heist sequence that is shot with natural sound, no dialogue and no music.

It's pure cinema!

It's also one of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful scenes in movie history. We've come to know the characters, we understand the high stakes for all of them if they don't pull off the big steal and worst of all, we're well aware of what will happen if they're caught - especially the desperate old man, Tony "le Stéphanois" (Jean Servais). He's just served five years of hard time for a heist gone wrong and his only choices in life amount to petty crime, gambling and/or getting caught and being tossed back into the hoosegow until he's dead (or as close to dead as he'll ever get).

These men are criminals, but we want them to succeed. It's post-war France and the opportunities for men who've known only one way to survive are pretty much non-existent. They live by a strict code of honour and they'll steal, but they won't kill (at least until they are pushed to the limit to do so). There's clearly honour amongst these thieves (save for the slimy, greasy, lazy borderline pimps who weasel into the proceedings later on) and we never once feel like there are viable options for our main characters.

And so, we follow them willingly and almost complicitously into the breach - an insanely daring heist that requires split-second timing, impeccable teamwork and one hell of a massive whack of horseshoes worth of luck stuffed up their respective and collective keisters.

If the heist was only thing Rififi had going for it, there's no doubt the picture would be highly regarded, but that its bookends are as solid and compelling as all get out place Dassin's movie on s pedestal that holds some of the greatest crime pictures ever made. The manner in which Dassin shoots the heist is completely in keeping with his approach to the rest of the movie. Shooting almost exclusively on location captures the naturalistic feeling of the film's hard-boiled tale. Much like his groundbreaking American crime pictures (Naked City, Brute Force) which, broke American cinema out of the studio bound mould and took them onto the streets a la the Italian neorealist movement, Rififi is a glorious blend of stylized frissons within the framework of life itself.

Dassin, of course, had a tiny budget and little time to shoot the film, so he personally scouted all the locations in order to get a strong visual sense in advance to allow for impeccable planning. In many ways, Rififi is a model picture for independent, low budget approaches that are still infused with the highest degree of production value. Within Dassin's impeccable eye for visual detail, he's doubly blessed by working with the genius production designer Alexandre Trauner who manages to deliciously goose the look of the film.

Narratively, the tale is tough-minded and even romantic, but the attention to the details of the lives of the criminals and the heist itself (including the meticulous planning) give it the crank it needs to always keep us glued to the screen. As well, there's no overwhelming (and annoying) sense of the proceedings ever diving into moralistic waters. We believe in these men AND their criminal intent. We want them to succeed and if things go wrong and all becomes futile, Dassin sets the picture up in such a way that we're going to feel and care deeply about whatever plight the characters suffer. It helps, also, that the casting is impeccable - especially Servais as the world weary "le Stéphanois", Dassin himself as the funny, sprightly and finally, almost tragic figure of the ladies' man, as well as the other disparate and memorable members of the team.

The importance of Rififi as both dazzling entertainment, but as well, its place in laying the foundations for crime pictures that followed as well as the whole French New Wave that would come a few years later is, frankly, incalculable. All its historical significance aside, it's one hell of a good show! Rififi is brutal, harrowing and darkly funny and it seldom got better than this. The dames are dames, its heroes noble and the villains are pure filth. Sure, the movie trades in on the tropes of the genre, but does so expertly within its overwhelming naturalism that nothing ever feels cliched and is, in fact, far fresher than most films made today.

"Rififi" is available on a gorgeous Criterion Collection Dual Format Blu-Ray/DVD release complete with New 2K digital restoration, my favourite uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a very inspirational interview with director Jules Dassin, set design drawings by art director Alexandre Trauner, still, trailer, an optional English-dubbed soundtrack (especially handily for additional screenings to just study Dassin's visuals and a terrific essay by Jim Hoberman.