Jules Dassin

  • Topkapi (1964)

    Topkapi (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) In my own developing history of Hollywood movies, I’ve earmarked the 1960s as the decade where Europe came to the rescue of American filmmaking: you can clearly feel the stagnation of post-studio-era Hollywood in the decade’s first years, and the energy of filmmaking being concentrated in censorship-busting Europe. Much of those lessons crossed the Atlantic during the decade and culminated in a 1967 crop of movies that changed everything. In this admittedly incomplete historical summary, Topkapi finds its place as one of the films that regurgitated the American heist film into something slightly grander, slightly more colourful (literally, in this case) and with a different sense of style. It certainly makes sense that Jules Dassin would be the director to do the transition — a successful Classic Hollywood director during the film noir age, Dassin was essentially exiled from the United States due to the McCarthy blacklist and re-established himself in Europe. By 1955, he was making the classic Rififi and already adapting the American style to the French palette. Topkapi feels like an extension of this work, going even farther even as other American movies such as Ocean’s Eleven were starting to digest his lessons from the earlier Rififi. An exotic and lighthearted heist film shot in glorious colour in Istanbul, Topkapi goes through the now-familiar motions of its subgenre: Assembling the specialized members of the crew (often by unfortunate happenstance), having them describe the heist, suffering from an execution that flies off in all directions, and wrapping things up in a bittersweet but amusing conclusion. There’s intra-group conflict, an alluring prize (a jewel-encrusted dagger), elaborate plans and freakish deviations getting bigger — in short, everything you’d want from that kind of film from a narrative perspective. It does help that Dassin knows what he’s doing behind a camera, and that he managed to bring together an impressive number of actors — with a lot of attention paid to Peter Ustinov’s bumbling hustler inadvertently brought into the plot (a role that earned him an Oscar), and Maximilian Schell as a master criminal having to deal with smaller fry. You can see bits and pieces of heist film DNA being put together here, most visibly the acrobatic tricks that would later be amplified in the first Mission: Impossible film. For twenty-first century viewers, the impact of all of this is curiously mixed: While impressive by mid-1960s standards, Topkapi suffers from being so successful and being imitated ever since. It’s fun to see where much of this started, or as part of an essential double feature with Rififi, but many viewers may shrug and ask about the hubbub if they compare it with its imitators. Still, it is a cinematic piece of history, and it’s still quite entertaining.

  • The Affairs of Martha (1942)

    The Affairs of Martha (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) While I’m reasonably happy with The Affairs of Martha, I can’t help but think that this is a film that leaves a lot of material on the table, and I can’t help but wonder how much better it could have been had it been made twenty years later. The premise itself is fun but unfulfilled: What if the elite set of Long Island starting fretting about the announcement of a tell-all book written by an unnamed servant girl of theirs? Much of the film’s comic potential is explored early on, as both the upper-class gets concerned, and the comfortable servant class also finds the development alarming. (“I’ve spent years getting my employer where I want her!” complains one of the veterans of the trade.)  There’s some bite to the opening moments, but it doesn’t really go anywhere — soon enough, the romantic comedy gets underway and nearly forgets about the opening premise. To be fair, the romantic complications that pile up do make for a serviceable film: as an heir to an upper-class family comes back from an expedition with a fiancée in tow, his previous marriage to a servant (the unknown author of the tell-all book!) comes back to make a mess of everyone’s plans. It pretty much ends up like you’d like to, but the class-division aspect takes a much smaller role than announced by the opening minutes. (Especially when the servant doesn’t have anything bad to say about her experience!)  Still, Marsha Hunt is lovely as Martha, Richard Carlson makes for a likable romantic lead, and there’s a lot to like about Virginia Weidler’s performance as a bratty too-smart teenager. (This was a kind of role that Weidler played a lot during her short Hollywood career, and you can look at her turn in The Philadelphia Story as another exemplary instance of that persona.)  The film doesn’t overstay its welcome despite shifting gears early on. The one strangely amusing note here is noticing that the film is an early effort from Jules Dassin, who would become far better known for hard-edged noir thriller in the late 1940s and then (due to the Hollywood Blacklist) be exiled in France, where he’d become famous for legendary crime thrillers. You can find distant echoes of The Affairs of Martha in more modern class-concerned fare such as The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries, but I still think that it missed an opportunity to be far more striking.

  • Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi] (1955)

    Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi] (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2020) Jules Dassin is a pivotal figure in how the American noir style literally migrated to France and eventually led (through Truffaut and others) to La nouvelle vague, which would later feed back into New Hollywood. The irony here being an unintended consequence of Hollywood putting Dassin on the black list and exiling him to France, where he’d continue his career. From a historical perspective, Du rififi chez les hommes is a crucial film in the evolution of the heist subgenre. It’s very reminiscent of The Asphalt Jungle, with a narrative structure revolving around a showcase heist sequence without dialogue or music. Even today, it makes for compelling viewing—especially in the details of the planning: the sequence in which they figure out how to disable an alarm is nothing short of ingenious, and there are plenty of details along the way to showcase the filmmakers’ cleverness. Still, Du rififi chez les hommes hails from the film noir tradition more than the heist one, as the plan falls apart after the crime and everything becomes a high drama of criminal tragedy. The ending sequence is gripping, as the protagonist races against the clock for one last heroic act. This merciless approach may feel scattered when measured against modern heist movies (most of whom are clearly made in a comic tone), but that’s what you get from early examples of the fusion between noir and heist. Du rififi chez les hommes clearly inspired many—from The Killing to Ocean’s Eleven and more.

  • The Naked City (1948)

    The Naked City (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) This probably won’t make any sense, but The Naked City is not noir and yet not quite not-noir. A police procedural presented from the get-go as almost a documentary, this is a film that goes filming on the street of New York City, complete with an intrusive narrator to telescope events into expositionary montages. The narration is the first thing that grabs viewers in the film—the second is the authentic depiction of New York at the end of the 1940s. A murder has been committed, and the film details the arduous process through which the detectives investigate the crime. It’s not noir because it’s usually filmed during the day, and it features law-enforcement characters as the heroes. And yet it is not quite not-noir in that it abandons the romanticism of the city to take us to the venal humans that populate it, acting out of lust or greed in order to break the law and hurt others. Director Jules Dassin’s execution more than complements a decent plot in order to give us seven days in the life of New York City, following a murder that will soon be swept away like the previous day’s newspapers. Some good moments by likable actors do help in making the film interesting throughout—including a heartbreaking line about mourning a murdered daughter and terrific last lines that inspired many. (“There are eight million stories in the naked city. That was one of them.”) The Naked City has been imitated and surpassed by scores of other movies, but it has kept it patina of period detail admirably well. At this point, it’s as good a time-travel gets.

  • Night and the City (1950)

    Night and the City (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Film noir is often about desperate people in bad circumstances, and in this light Night and the City certainly qualifies as such. Unusually taking place in London rather than in a large American city, it nonetheless plays up the grimness of low-class hustling, with a protagonist perpetually convinced that he’s only one lucky break, one spin of the wheel away from success. Grim and tawdry, it takes place in the city’s underworld, rubbing shoulders with wrestlers and killers. Richard Widmark is not bad as the protagonist, but I suspect that most viewers will better appreciate Gene Tierney as his long-suffering girlfriend. The unrelenting grimness of the result isn’t only in the atmosphere, but in the lack of sympathy for any character and the unsparing ending of director Jules Dassin’s preferred version (a British version reportedly softens up the ending—it’s not the one I saw). Night and the City is not a film for every audience or every mood, but it does stand as a prototypical noir even despite not taking place within American borders. You even get a (repeated) didactic mention of “Montréal, in Canada” just for the fun of it.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2020) There have been many films noir in the 1950s, and they do get to blur if you’re watching too many of them in rapid succession. What director Jules Dassin’s Night and the City has over others is its somewhat unusual location: For as American a genre as noir, it feels refreshing to see the film take place in London. The historical circumstances surrounding this are strange—Dassin was on the blacklist at the time, and MGM was looking to take advantage of some financial incentives to produce films in England. (It also set in motion the very improbable series of events that would make Jules Dassin the father of an iconic French singer, but that’s going way beyond the scope of this review.)  Taking place in the very noirish demimonde of boxing promotion, Night and the City piles on the noir trademarks; desperate characters squeezed into illegality by bad luck and circumstance, moody black-and-white cinematography; plenty of scenes in which characters run in deserted alleyways; a femme fatale, this time played by the legendary Greer Garson. Plus, the London backdrop is quite intriguing as a change of pace. It doesn’t make Night and the City all that good, but it does help it distinguish itself from so many close contemporaries.