Jules Dassin, 1911-2008
April 2, 2008

Less than one week after the passing of the great Richard Widmark comes the death of a filmmaker whose impressive body of work is led by a film that featured Widmark in one of his finest performances -- 1950’s Night and the City. The film was helmed by the Middletown, New York-born director, screenwriter and actor Jules Dassin, who died on Monday at the age of 96. 

Though he’s mostly remembered for such fine films as Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964), both of which starred his future wife, Greek actress Melina Mercouri, it’s his earlier Hollywood films that left the biggest impression on cinephiles. Dassin’s post-Fifties films were made after he left Hollywood for France in 1953 due to his being “blacklisted” following the House Un-American Activities Committee testimony by his fellow directors Edward Dymytryk and Frank Tuttle, who recalled Dassin’s Communist Party membership in the 1930s.

But it was his earlier film noirs that people like myself caught on the late show in the Seventies that made the strongest impression—-films like the prison drama Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn, The Naked City (1948) with Barry Fitzgerald and Howard Duff, Thieves’ Highway (1949) with Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb and, of course, Night and the City, with Widmark and Francis Sullivan. All are classic examples of the film noir form – stunning photographed, tightly edited, tautly written and effectively acted. It’s not surprising that the quartet are are available in superlative Criterion Collection DVD editions.

Interestingly, the first film Dassin created overseas following his blacklisting was a holdover of sorts from his American noir period -—the great French heist movie Rififi (1954). And, again, it’s not a surprise that Rififi is available as a Criterion disc, too.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on April 2, 2008 | Comments (0)