Director: Jules Dassin
Although Jules Dassin wouldn’t go on the Hollywood blacklist until 1950, he and Twentieth Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck knew it to be an inevitability before Night and the City had been completed. The resulting film is suitably defined by backstabbing, betrayals, and the destructive effects of money and the pursuit of bettering one’s social standing. This hellish, expressionistic vision of London is far removed from Dassin’s own urban imaginings in The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway, which (especially in the former) treated cities as organized and geometric, undoubtedly defined by crime but without the desperation and nightmarish quality of this later film. As scam artist Harry Fabian, Richard Widmark is brilliantly cast. He giggles, sweats profusely, and tightens his lips to bear his bulging white teeth–the image of a desperate would-be promoter, but also a man slowly succumbing to a fatal bear hug. Cinematographer Max Greene is just as adept at conveying the paranoiac atmosphere in close-ups as he is in scenes that convey the shadowed alleys and hellish attractions of London after dark. Widmark often faces the camera in tight close-ups–the perfect scale to acknowledge every bead of sweat on his exhausted head–and his image is frequently surrounded with a rogues’ gallery of watchful eyes in the background. These shots are rendered in shallow focus, creating a sense of claustrophobia by making it seem as though the characters are stacked right on top of each other.
Director: Jules Dassin
The famed centerpiece of Jules Dassin’ Rififi is a silent heist sequence that lasts about thirty minutes. It’s a masterpiece of nonverbal communication, both between the characters on screen and what Dassin is able to relate to the audience. The thoughts and anxieties of the criminals are transferred through editing, spatial relationships, and the performances of the actors, and the audience is informed of the processes entailed only as the events are occurring. For a genre that often relishes in characters who posture and talk a big game, it’s a nice change of pace to demonstrate the criminals as simple tradesmen doing their jobs. There isn’t a lot else in the picture that lives up to the masterful heist, which seems more cobbled together than a unified vision–Brute Force, Thieves’ Highway, and even The Naked City feel like they have better determined, understood worlds. The nightclub song that reveals the meaning of the title (roughly translated as “rough and tumble”) seems interested in a psychosexual interpretation of criminal acts, but Dassin all but abandons the idea in favor of discussing the masculine code. Dassin was often interested in exploring the unspoken rules that governed man’s relationship with his fellow man (his later film, La Loi, being the most literal example), but here it seems like his character’s motivations don’t extend far beyond vengeance, with each act seeming like a mere spoke on a cycle of violence.
Director: Jules Dassin
A modern reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac, A Letter for Evie starts promising and with plenty of charm. The cast – Hume Cronyn as the Cyrano type, John Carroll as his wolfish companion, and Marsha Hunt as the object of their interest – were more than enough to lead a B-picture of this stock, and, in fact, they have considerably more appeal than some of the major stars of the era. Cronyn was a very special performer who, in addition to projecting a level of sensitivity that came naturally to him given his size and unassuming looks, possessed a remarkable intensity. In Brute Force, for example, which was a later collaboration with director Jules Dassin, his prison security chief is a memorable sadist, who delights in punishing the inmates for his own presumably sexual urges. Though his co-star in Evie, John Carroll (who resembles a mix of George Brent and Clark Gable), dwarfs him, Cronyn is never purely a victim and he isn’t afraid to throw a few punches. As game as the cast is, however, Dassin eventually loses the heart of the picture and things topple into a mean-spirited affair. Persistent to a fault, Cronyn goes beyond hopeless romantic and appears fully deranged as he plays drunk, wrecks Hunt’s apartment, and nearly attempts rape. When the film gets over the madcap and attempts to restore order, the sentiment feels unearned and Dassin mishandles key dramatic scenes. Despite the flaws, however, it’s a picture that you can’t help but root for, even when it doesn’t live up to what it could have been.
Director: Jules Dassin
Joan Crawford’s long-standing career at MGM was on the downswing in 1942 as the studio ushered in a new era of stars like Judy Garland and Greer Garson. Her second-to-last picture for Louis B. Mayer was Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, a tonally confused propaganda effort in which the French Crawford harbors a downed American pilot played by John Wayne. The picture has promising moments early on, including a rapidly-cut montage sequence that mixes newsreel footage with staged elements, before it ultimately sinks with Crawford’s performance. Her scenes with Wayne are good (even if Crawford later joked, “we hit it off like filet mignon and ketchup!”), but as the espionage plot takes over in the third act, she appears to give up entirely. In a car chase, she can’t bring herself to do anything but widen her eyes and clench her jaw. The script is partially to blame, sure, as it reduces the star of the picture to a passive observer, but Crawford doesn’t have it in her to overcome the weakness on the page and maintain her character’s dignity. She later acknowledged the film’s poor quality and admitted that the only reason she made it was in hopes to get budding star Wayne in the sack. That they never hit it off is a tragedy – at least somebody would have gotten something worthwhile out of the picture.
Director: Jules Dassin
A modernization of the Pygmalion myth, Never on Sunday made a star out of the 40-year-old Melina Mercouri as the familiar “hooker with a heart of gold” sexpot. As lively as she is on screen, as the leading man Jules Dassin is completely unsuitable. Even in overplaying every gesture, he lacks magnetism, a deficiency that is only further amplified by the supreme charisma of Mercouri. A great director of dark thrillers, this type of territory (The Law also submerges the viewer into the specifics of a small European town) isn’t well suited for Dassin, who seems to have a need for plot convolutions if only to offer something interesting for his characters to do.
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