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(1955)

Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, Carl Moehner, Marie Sabouret; dir: Jules Dassin 

As a French production made by an American movie veteran, Rififi forges a world where the Hays Code of censorship never existed and Hollywood’s robust showmanship wasn’t forced to reconcile itself to America’s Puritanism.

Classic Hollywood filmmaking language, especially its tabloid-pulp side street of film noir, is both unmistakable yet impossible to imitate. That is, unless you don’t need to imitate, being a veteran of the system. Jules Dassin had been making tough, politically-conscious dramas of men under pressure since 1942, before HUAC red-baiting forced him into blacklist exile during the fifties. After years in European limbo, his Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes created a fusion of Hollywood filmmaking language with enlightened European sensibility that, for such a potent combination, has never been surpassed.

What director Jean-Pierre Melville synthesised from the French side (witness his bar in Le Doulos based on American models never seen in a French setting), Dassin conjures up from the perspective of the left-hand side of the Atlantic with his Hollywood nightclub architecture, echoing to the strains of doleful Parisian blues in Rififi. Here a chanteuse sings the film’s eponymous song, and gives us some clues as to its elusive meaning: "slugging it out" is one which, in context, may mean rough love play, but ultimately its point is its very unknowability to all but the initiates – the ‘gang’.

We know we’re moving into a different cinematic world in the key confrontation scene that comes early between wronged gangster ‘the Stephanois’ (Belgian actor Jean Servais) and his ex-squeeze, Mado (Marie Sabouret), who betrayed him to police. He demands compensation through taking her jewellery and, as she sheds the baubles, his next demand - for her coat - turns power to eroticism, brought home as she continues to shed… Nothing is seen, all is suggested, but it’s a vengeful, domineering (and hence political) assault that wouldn’t even have reached American censors, let alone been passed by them. Coming after the familiarity and comfort of the Hollywood cinematic style Rififi uses, in which Hays Code morality has always been embedded, it’s a shock. That the flesh isn’t always seen sadistically is immediately realised in the following playful bath scene featuring a buxom soapfight – something equally as foreign to Classical Hollywood style. "Go warm up the bed", is this scene’s closing dialogue.

Sex rears its head again as the gang members bid farewell to their loved ones before the heist through erogenous touching in scenes that have a truth in them that can’t be denied, yet would never have been contemplated in 1950s Hollywood. Then immediately after this, strident heraldic music - very Hollywood – presages the ‘job’. In this way Rififi essays a constant dialectic between two worlds of representation: European sensibility and American showbiz. By conducting this conversation single-handedly, in this one film can be experienced the ‘cross-examination’ between Europe and America that was French noir.

Music plays a big part, especially for a film famed for its ‘silence’, in Americanising Rififi. We are unknowingly prepared for the unvoiced drama to come when seeing the heist’s foundations being carefully laid - in a montage of mime! This extraordinary sequence of preparation is driven by breathless music – even the safecracker (played by Dassin himself) is seen as a cash-paying jewellery customer – completely sans dialogue. How very French this must have seemed from an American point of view. It’s a short but lovely sequence – no wonder we are barracking for the crooks!

The ‘silence’ of the fabled heist sequence glides in imperceptibly; it’s almost an elision. This setpiece is choreographed to perfection – it’s a ballet of teamwork, camaraderie and cunning, building inexorably without a wasted moment. And because it’s character-driven, it grows organically out of the narrative of gangland connectivity, rather than being dropped in with bookends as in later copies of this sequence like The Hot Rock (1972) and Dassin’s own, regrettable reprise, Topkapi (1964). Rififi ‘s famed sequence remains legendary not because it was first but because of its humanity, all eye contact, frailties and egos in full flight.

As the gang members’ nerves stretch tauter, the shadows steadily deepen, the camera angles skewing more rakishly off level. But it’s the ever-present sound that drives our tension – grinding saws, stepping feet, breathing bodies – we’re there! (Talk about mime!)

Stunning cinematography by Philipe Agostini (who also shot 1939’s Le Jour Se Lève) has echoes of The Third Man in its rococo noir: European wedding-cake architecture dramatised in destabilising fields of light and acute, ink-black voids. Attention to detail comes in their leader smoking at the crime scene but holding on to the match – forensics won’t get any breaks from these guys!

The ultimate putdown of police is their near-total absence (as it’s gangsters who initiate and make the running on ‘investigations’) which, like Fritz Lang’s M (1931), implies a lawlessness closer to jungle rule than constitutional – an unsurprising view for someone like Dassin hounded from their country by the kangaroo court of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Who can blame Dassin for running a dialectic between Hollywood and Europe? It’s the arc of his life and career after HUAC forced him into exile. In the film the escalating capacity of the state-of-the-art alarm systems they must outwit comes to stand for ‘progress’ as the real world sees it, the ‘overground’ that is the flipside of the underworld we’ve come to love through these sympathetic characters. Rififi makes its subversive point with subtlety.

The final death ride, in a ‘49 Oldsmobile ragtop (almost certainly the director’s personal ride), with the rescued boy in his cowboy suit enjoying his toy pistol waving shenanigans, oblivious to the dying gangster at the wheel, mocks the American tough guy aesthetic. Its stunning visual design has a subtlety and economy that leaves the Hays Code ‘crime must not be seen to pay’ admonitions standing exposed for their artlessness. But at the climax there is also a moment of paternal tenderness, recalling the fadeout of the American noir classic Double Indemnity (1944) in which Edward G.Robinson cradles the dying Fred MacMurray. It ties together two works of a mutually reinforcing canon, of which Rififi may be one of its ultimate distillations.

- Roger Westcombe