Jules Dassin, 96; blacklisted director of film noir

Jules Dassin, the blacklisted American filmmaker who was a master of film noir, directing such classics as “Brute Force,” “The Naked City” and “Rififi,” died late today in an Athens hospital. He was 96.

The cause of death was not made public. The Associated Press reported that he had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks.

Dassin, considered one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era, directed his most influential film, “Rififi,” while living in France after being blacklisted in the early 1950s. “Rififi” earned him a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955.

“Rififi” is the “benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against,” Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote in 2000 when the movie was re-released in the United States. The film was widely considered the prototype for films like “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Mission: Impossible.” Even Dassin himself made another film based on “Rififi,” the 1964 “Topkapi,” which also starred Melina Mercouri, whom he had worked with in the better-known English-language film “Never on Sunday” and later married.

Dassin was born in Middletown, Conn., one of eight children of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, a barber, moved the family to New York City, and Dassin graduated from high school in the Bronx.

He got into show business as an actor in New York’s Yiddish theater in the mid-1930s. But upon discovering “that an actor I was not,” he switched to directing, first on the New York stage and then in films.

In the early 1940s, Dassin went to Hollywood, eventually landing a contract with MGM. His first feature film for the studio was “Nazi Agent,” which was released in 1942. He did several other films for MGM, including “The Canterville Ghost” (1944) and “A Letter for Evie” (1946), before directing “Brute Force” (1947), the violent prison film starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn.

That was followed by “Naked City” (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on location on the streets of New York; “Thieves’ Highway” (1949), a gritty film about a World War II veteran who sets out to avenge his brother’s death; and “Night and the City” (1950), a film noir starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. Widmark died last week at 93.

But by the early 1950s, the hunt was on for Communist Party sympathizers in Hollywood and Dassin’s name joined countless others on the blacklist.

Dassin never denied that he had been a member of the Communist Party. As part of the New York theater scene in the 1930s while the Depression still deeply affected millions of Americans, he was among many who saw the Communist Party as a force of good for working people. He left the party in the late 1930s over its position on the Soviet alliance with Hitler and the party’s downplaying of the outbreak of World War II.

In 1951, fellow directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle offered Dassin’s name to the House Un-American Activities Committee, saying Dassin was part of the Hollywood “Communist faction.” Although Dassin was never called to testify before HUAC, he could not find employment after their testimony, and in 1953 he moved his family to France.

His life wasn’t easy in Europe. Initially, Dassin was unable to find work, but he was finally asked to write the screenplay for and direct “Rififi,” based on a novel by Auguste le Breton. It concerns a group of jewel thieves who in the end have more to fear from one another than from the police. Dassin plays one of the thieves, Cesar, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita.

Dassin told National Public Radio’s David D’Arcy in 2000, on the occasion of the U.S. re-release of “Rififi,” that when making the film he remembered advice that Alfred Hitchcock once gave him: “Tell them what you’re gonna do, and then make them worry about how you’re going to do it.”

The centerpiece of the film is the now-famous half-hour burglary sequence, which is done without music or dialogue – only the sound of hammers and drills, plaster being chiseled, an occasional muffled cough. The scene is permeated with breathless tension.

“Few avant-garde films have demonstrated so skillfully how time and pace affect perception,” film critic Michael Sragow wrote in 2000.