Rififi, the title of Jules Dassin’s much-revered heist film, is a word that means many things in the French criminal argot invented by author Auguste le Breton, upon whose book, Du Rififi chez les Hommes, the movie is based. It can mean “rough and tumble,” “pitched battle” or, according to the video box of the recent digitally remastered re-issue, simply “trouble.” This tuneful, stripped-down version of the title is alternately dark and zippy, the perfect moniker for the cleverly-staged song performed a quarter of the way into the film, where a lounge singer slinks in the foreground as the silhouetted figure of a spy pantomimes behind a white screen. It prefigures all of those wonderful 007 title credit sequences, not to mention television’s “The Avengers” and “The Wild Wild West.” So the question I asked myself was, should we now be giving director Dassin the patent on this idea, as so many have done, for “inventing” the heist genre with Rififi?

Time and tradition have been very kind to Dassin’s sleek and silly caper movie. It won Dassin the Best Director award at Cannes in 1954, and has been hailed as “a landmark,” the “granddaddy of all heist films,” and “the best film noir I’ve ever seen,” according to a young François Truffaut, who wrote that last phrase in an effusive review from his Cahiers du Cinema days. Another young director, Quentin Tarantino, was reported to have used a few of Rififi’s ideas in Reservoir Dogs. Of course, both directors could have been fooled by the movie, this “gentle fraud,” as one Village Voice reviewer tagged it when it premiered.

There was at least one great heist film before Rififi: The Asphalt Jungle, made in 1950 by John Huston, and many far superior ones after it, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), (which is silly but knows it; and much more fun than Dassin’s picture), Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes (1971), Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and two films from Michael Mann, Thief (1981) and Heat (1995). It’s difficult to understand how both Rififi and Dassin’s reputation have held up when we can now readily see the work of directors such as Fritz Lang (The Big Heat), Anthony Mann (T-Men), Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy, The Big Combo), Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï) and Jacques Becker (Honour Among Thieves), all of whom made tougher, more exciting, much richer films with fewer frills and without the noticeable clumsiness of Dassin’s effort. While Lewis’ Gun Crazy is not ostensibly a heist movie, there is more energy and spontaneous invention in the single-take bank robbery—shot entirely from the back seat of a car—than there is in the lengthy and strained, nearly silent jewelry store burglary that is the famous centerpiece of Rififi.
That sequence runs 30 minutes, as a quartet of thieves breaks through the ceiling, drops into the store below, quiets the alarm and then drills into the safe, eventually netting jewels worth more than 200 million francs. All of this is performed without dialogue or music, just the natural sounds of breaking and entering. I found the sequence a welcome interlude in the film—not because it was particularly stylized or original—but because it was a relief from the laughably hardboiled dialogue. Perhaps it was the translation, or just Dassin’s attempt to Americanize the French underworld, but there is something pointedly ridiculous in hearing Jean Servais, as world-weary gang leader Tony Shephanois, utter lines like, “Get caught with a rod and it’s the slammer for life” and “Beat it chump. Scram!”

Perhaps the glowing praise the film has garnered in the years since its release came first from viewers who were enthralled by this clever technique: the transporting of the idioms of the American gangster underworld to the cooler glaze of the Continent, where the French will often not say what they mean, or they will say it with a seductive wink. The director has admitted he did not speak French well, and that, more than any other excuse, explains why the dialogue is either spare or thickly clichéd, and the break-in itself completely wordless. But there is something vulgar in Dassin’s strategy. It has the feel of a gimmick, or a cheap attempt at redefining his career.

Dassin, who was born in Middletown, CT in 1911 and has made his home in Greece for many years, was just beginning to hit his stride in America after he directed a trio of noir suspense thrillers—Brute Force, The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway—all of which were praised for their on-location, documentary-like realism. But then he was fingered as a Communist by fellow director Edward Dmytryk (see MM # 16- ed.), and forced into exile by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He moved to Europe, where he made Night and the City in London, starring Richard Widmark as a small-time hustler, then moved on to Paris.

Rififi relies heavily on the stereotypes of American film noir. The opening scene is of a poker game: cards and money and men in fedoras. Framed at a high angle, looking down on their brims, it’s instantly recognizable as similar to a scene in My Darling Clementine, John Ford’s great noir western, complete with Dassin’s version of Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday. Tony Stephanois sports a loser’s addiction to gambling and a tubercular cough. The scene should work as homage, but coming at you so early in the movie, before there is any context or one has any knowledge of the characters, it feels like a rip-off, a rootless imitation of something terrific you know you’ve seen somewhere else.

Tony masterminds the jewel heist with three other men, all of them decent enough crooks, all of them wanting to make a big score and then settle back into a life resembling domesticity. There is the suggestion that the crime is being carried out in the name of love, and Dassin hints at the emotional complexity of the criminals’ lives. Each one is shown with his lover, each one will obviously be losing more than their freedom if they’re caught. But the characterizations are little more than superficial; the scenes that establish their relationships are slapdash and perfunctory.

There are guns and cigarettes and dope; venal mobsters and femme fatales; betrayals and outdated codes of honor. But all of the elements are borrowed from better movies; movies without the patina of Parisian couture, without the sympathy vote for a director forced to flee his own country. It is as though Dassin is directing by opening his suitcase of B-movie tropes and showing them off for the critics. The film is exhibitionist rather than organic; Dassin directs not with an expatriate’s respect but with a tourist’s condescension. (Dassin would later make the “granddaddy of all tourist films,” Never on Sunday, for which he received two Oscar nominations, for Best Director and Best Screenplay.)

The celebrated heist sequence does contain a few moments of ingenuity—the umbrella inserted through the ceiling hole to catch the falling debris, the breaking through the back of the safe—but you are always too aware that the thieves aren’t speaking. They nod to each other with great seriousness when a whisper would do just as well. They seem more aware that they’re shooting a scene for cinematic posterity than robbing a jewelry store. The silence is unnecessary. It saps the tension from the sequence.

There is also little at stake in the aftermath. Cesar, the safecracker, lifts an expensive ring from the store and then gives it to his girlfriend, who happens to work for a mobster who, upon discovering the ring, now has the means to blackmail the thieves into cutting him in for a share of the take. The theft of the ring is a contrived device, and given that Dassin himself played the role of Cesar, he should be spanked for ruining the final 30 minutes of his own movie. Since the mechanics of the heist have taken up much of the film’s two-hour running time, you haven’t had the time to invest anything emotionally in the characters. Their self-destruction comes fast and furious, but it is without pathos. You couldn’t care less. Cesar squeals, there is a child’s kidnapping, everyone is shot, the code of honor is tarnished once again. The movie derails so badly that all you are left with is the less-than-spectacular memory of the heist scene, which is hardly enough of a basis to carry the legend of the film.
So why the fuss? Why bother devoting this column—the first in a new emphasis on world cinema—to a film that is overrated and unworthy of its renown? A writer’s crankiness? The need to debunk a legend? Partly, yes, but not really.

I sat down to write about Rififi because, I’m embarassed to admit, I’d never seen it, and since this summer alone there are at least three new heist movies opening at multiplexes—including The Score, which features three generations of elite American actors, Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, and Marlon Brando—I figured it was about time I take a look at the godfather of caper films. My surprise and disappointment in Rififi, my reaction to what seemed a pretentious bit of Ugly Americanism on the part of the director and the critical literati that lauded it, forced me to reassess what passes for a classic, and how misplaced praise and the passing of time can sometimes embellish and elevate mediocrity.

In future columns I plan to look at and write about the careers of foreign directors—the famous and the unknown—as well as the cinematic New Waves that continue to rise and fall throughout the world. But I will be suspicious of Americans in exile who trade on the exotica of their circumstances, who substitute subtitles for stories of honest revelation. Rififi will still have its admirers, but it is a film that offers few mysteries upon even a first viewing. Don’t be upset if it doesn’t hold any for you, as if you’re somehow not getting it. There are very few truly valuable gems to be had. MM