Hot rocks

The return of Dassin’s film noir classic

by Steve Vineberg

Jules Dassin’s 1955 caper thriller Rififi is a hard-boiled entertainment in the tradition of The Maltese Falcon or Kiss of Death, but its style is more restrained, and though Dassin was a native of Middletown, Connecticut (he was forced into European exile during the HUAC hearings), it feels distinctly, almost quintessentially, French. The setting is Paris, where the lights on the Champs-Élysées have a hazy nimbus around them and the nighttime streets of Montmartre glisten with a moist sheen. The hero, the tubercular master thief Tony (Jean Servais), is an old-fashioned romantic. Returning from prison to find that his girlfriend (Marie Sabouret) has left him for a nightclub gangster (Marcel Lupovici), he goes to see her in her new milieu, and there’s a heart-shattered look in his Jean Gabin eyes. Then he takes her back to his apartment, orders her to strip, and beats her with his belt, understanding that her new man will spot the marks on her back and that he and Tony will likely end up brawling. One of his partners in a jewelry-store heist, Mario (Robert Manuel), has a broad, music-hall face; he’s Italian, but his looks and style place him in the tradition of French comics like Julien Carette, who played the actor in Grand Illusion. Another of the thieves, a Milanese safecracker named César (played by Dassin himself, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita), woos a singer at the nightclub (Magali Noël), though they can’t speak each other’s language. In bed, he offers her a ring he pocketed during the robbery; she’s touched by his gesture but, sizing up his shabby courtliness, she assumes it’s a fake.

The re-release of this gripping, elegantly crafted movie, which hasn’t been seen in years, in a terrific new print gives audiences a chance to look at the source of such pictures as The Killing, Topkapi and The Usual Suspects. Dassin himself must have been influenced by The Asphalt Jungle and perhaps Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, but here — and this is another way in which Rififi feels foreign to an American audience — the quartet of jewelry thieves (the fourth is Jo, played by Carl Möhner) don’t meet their fate because they experience personality conflicts exacerbated by the pressure of having to remain underground — rather, they’re done in by a combination of a careless mistake and the sexual jealousy of Tony’s romantic rival. These men have a professional respect for one another’s talents and a common commitment to the project; there are no tensions within the group. Dassin underscores their deftness and expertise in the famous centerpiece sequence, where their execution of the robbery is presented silently except for Georges Auric’s exuberant, pop-symphonic score. It’s an ingenious scene, a model of a certain kind of highly detailed workplace narrative filmmaking, and it goes on, amazingly, for nearly half an hour. It’s easy to become so engrossed in the texture and strategies of the quartet’s thievery that you forget the activity they’re pursuing is illegal.

The title of the movie is explained in a song Magali Noël performs in the club. While a male and a female dancer execute an athletic pas de deux in silhouette behind her, Noël sings, “It’s the lingo of the streetwise/The battle cry of real tough guys” and translates the term “rififi” as “rough and tumble.” At the end of the number she’s stretched out on the steps leading up to the nightclub stage with a decidedly post-coital expression on her face: rififi, the lyric implies, is a major turn-on for the women who hang around the guys. The film’s French title is Du rififi chez les hommes, and though there are four women in important roles — the others are Clyde Sylvain as Mario’s wife and Janine Darcey as Jo’s — it’s really a movie about les hommes, about loyalties among men. When one of the thieves is caught and intimidated into betraying the others, he takes his punishment without surprise; he knows he’s broken the sacred rules of this male world.

Dassin and his co-screenwriter, René Wheeler, dress the story up with colorful flourishes. The gangster has a pair of brothers who are in league with him (this fraternal relationship prefigures the one in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player), and one of them (Robert Hossein) has a dope habit; there’s a tense moment when he raids the nightclub office for the phone number of his supplier. The fence who handles the hot jewels is a cheery, workaday fellow who tells the thieves, as he hands over a suitcase full of cash, that their toil is finished while his is just beginning. The movie’s insistence on treating the robbery as high-quality professional labor is its most original idea. Once the jewels have been lifted and the film moves on to the aftermath of the robbery, the elimination of the criminals proceeds with grim inevitability. But Rififi doesn’t lose its wit, which is in the design of the action sequences, or go flabby. At two hours less two minutes, it’s a remarkably taut movie.