American film director and actor renowned for The Naked City, Topkapi and Rififi
Tim Pulleine
Wednesday April 2, 2008
The Guardian
Jules Dassin, the film director, screenwriter and actor, who has died in Athens aged 96, claimed that after the screening of his film He Who Must Die at Cannes in 1957, Jean Cocteau, who was on the jury, fainted with admiration, exclaiming: "To think this beautiful film was made by a Frenchman." Dassin added laconically: "They set the record straight after they brought him round."
For the key fact about Dassin, his name notwithstanding, is that he was American, born and raised, a native of Connecticut, and the work on which his reputation rests, such films as Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), is essentially American in tone. In the eyes of some, however, he was un-American: it was being named as a communist before a 1949 hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) that led him into European exile. Dassin was fascinated with the theatre, and, after a variety of foreign travels, he worked in the 1930s as an actor with New York's Yiddish Theatre and with the leftwing Group Theatre. He also wrote scripts for radio, and on the strength of this went to Hollywood. He was an assistant director at RKO, then directed several routine pictures for MGM. It was at Universal, under the aegis of the enterprising producer Mark Hellinger, that he made Brute Force, his first personal work. Set in a state penitentiary, and climaxing in an abortive breakout, the film featured the young Burt Lancaster and contained a memorably chilling portrayal by Hume Cronyn of the sadistic chief officer. Considered violent in its day, the film communicates a true sense of desperation.
The populist, democratic impulse that is submerged in Brute Force is allowed to surface in his subsequent collaboration with Hellinger, The Naked City. An experiment in American neo-realism, filmed almost entirely on the streets of New York with an unfamiliar cast, the film is in outline a thriller about a police manhunt. But it elaborates this material to highly original effect, creating a vivid portrait of big city life.
Thieves' Highway (1949), a melodrama about the trucking industry and racketeering within it, is conventional by comparison, but still displays its director's keen response to milieu, this time the market district of San Francisco. This film was made for Fox, who then, temporarily to forestall the effect of his being named before Huac, sent Dassin to England to make a thriller of a different sort, Night and the City (1950). This film inverts the dynamics of Thieves' Highway: the protagonist (Richard Widmark) is a small-time crook engaged in an ever more frantic pursuit of the chance to strike it rich, and the depiction of nocturnal London is nightmarishly stylised. The drama ends on the banks of the Thames in a grey dawn.
Dassin's own prospects, given that he had been placed on Hollywood's anti-communist blacklist, were less than bright. He did not work again until 1955, when in France he directed Rififi, a tale of dishonour among thieves, centred on an audaciously detailed jewel robbery, its long heist sequence without music or dialogue. Though the script is superficial, the film gains from the skill with which the action is staged on the streets of Paris, and its great commercial success established Dassin in Europe.
He Who Must Die represented a new departure. Based on Nicos Kazantzakis's Christ Recrucified, it takes place in a Turkish-occupied Greek village in 1921, and contrives to be a political morality tale in which the villagers' passion play merges with reality. Intermittently powerful, the film cannot ultimately escape from literary conceit, and in this sense it foreshadows much of Dassin's subsequent work. It also introduced him to the Greek actor Melina Mercouri, with whom his life was from then on to be linked. The couple were married from 1966 until Mercouri's death in 1994.
Throughout the 1980s, Mercouri was the Greek minister of culture and fought for the return of the Elgin Marbles. Dassin's collaboration with her began with the modest Greek-made comedy Never On Sunday (1960), a commercial hit due in particular to its popular theme tune. Dassin (who had played small roles in Thieves' Highway and Rififi) played opposite Mercouri, lending the enterprise something of the air of a superior home movie. But reaching for neo-classical resonance in such works as Phaedra (1962) or A Dream of Passion (1978), which sought modern parallels with Medea, resulted in works overblown to the point of embarrassment.
However, in lighter vein, the caper movie Topkapi (1964) intermittently revived memories of Dassin's early skill with its consummate use of Istanbul locations and in the staging of another complex jewel robbery. And, in 1968, Dassin was able to direct again in the US. The result was Up Tight, a melodrama set in the black ghetto of Cleveland. The script is a transposition of Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer, which does not locate altogether happily to its new surroundings. With his masterly cameraman Boris Kaufman, Dassin managed to lend the story a dimension of tragedy.
Dassin's film-making career ended anti-climactically with the Canadian-made Circle of Two (1980). But if his later work described a downward curve, his earlier achievements remain. He will be remembered as a master of the craft of location filming. How much of a master is nicely illustrated by an anecdote from Marvin Wald, one of the writers of The Naked City. He recalled attending a preview and commenting to the director on the effectiveness of a shot during the climax on the Williamsburg bridge, in which a high-angle view looks down past the fugitive murderer to a spread of tennis matches in progress on courts far below. It was, Wald suggested, quite a stroke of luck that the tennis players should have been there at the right time. At this, Dassin snorted. "Lucky?" he said. "Those tennis players were all extras. I put 'em there."
He is survived by his daughter Julie from his first marriage: his son Joe was a popular French singer until his death in 1980.
· Jules Dassin, film director, born December 18 1911; died March 31 2008
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