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The director with Gina Lollobrigida on location filming "The Law" in 1958.
The director of 'Rififi' and 'Never on Sunday' is considered one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era. He moved to France after being blacklisted in the early 1950s.
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 Monday 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.
FOR THE RECORD:
Photo GalleryDassin obituary: The obituary in Tuesday's California section on director Jules Dassin labeled his "The Tell-Tale Heart" a feature film. It was a 20-minute short. —
"Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and true friend," Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in a statement. "His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."
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 as a communist 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 it was re-released in the United States.
The film was widely considered the prototype for films like "Ocean's Eleven" and "Mission: Impossible." Dassin himself made another film based on "Rififi," 1964's "Topkapi," which starred Melina Mercouri, whom he had worked with on the popular English-language film "Never on Sunday," in which she played a good-hearted prostitute. Dassin and Mercouri later married.
Turan said the influence of "Rififi" "is hard to overstate." The critic wrote that one section of the film is "a model of tension and precision." In the sequence, Dassin spends "a full 30 minutes on the actual robbery, a completely wordless half-hour (though it makes good use of sound effects) that racks the nerves and provides a master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking."
FOR THE RECORD
An earlier version of this article omitted the name of Paul Buhle, co-author "Tender Comrades," a 1997 book about the blacklist, and gave the wrong last name of Gilligan for its other author, Patrick McGilligan.
Dassin was born on Dec. 18, 1911, in Middletown, Conn., one of eight children of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, a barber, moved the family to New York City. 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 working for MGM, Universal and 20th Century Fox. His first feature film for MGM was "The Tell-Tale Heart" which was followed by "Nazi Agent," released in 1942. He did several other average films for MGM, including "The Canterville Ghost" (1944) and "A Letter for Evie" (1946).
But "Brute Force" (1947), the violent prison film starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn, marked a striking change in direction to grittier fare. That was followed by "Naked City" (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; "Thieves' Highway" (1949), a gritty film about independent truckers battling a crooked produce wholesaler; 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 Communist Party member. As part of the New York theater scene in the 1930s when 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 that Dassin was part of the Hollywood "Communist faction." Although Dassin was never called to testify before the committee, he could not find employment after their testimony. In 1953 he moved his family to France.
Initially, Dassin was unable to find work. But he eventually was 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 had once given him: "Tell them what you're gonna do, and then make them worry about how you're going to do it."
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