Jules Dassin, blacklisted filmmaker, dies at 96

OBITUARY

Jean Jacques file Levy/The Associated Press

Jules Dassin, who directed "Never on Sunday," at a party in Cannes in 1978.

By Richard Severo

Published: April 1, 2008, International Herald Tribune

Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his past ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96. A spokeswoman for Hygeia Hospital confirmed his death but did not give a cause, The Associated Press reported.

Dassin is most widely remembered for films he made after he fled Hollywood in the 1950s, including "Never on Sunday," with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he later married; "Topkapi," with Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell; and the 1955 French thriller "Rififi."

But before his blacklisting, he had also carved out a successful Hollywood career making noir movies like "Brute Force," a prison drama starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn and "The Naked City," an influential New York City police yarn that won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing.

Dassin's last major effort before his undoing was "Night and the City," a 1950 film shot in London starring Richard Widmark, who died March 24, as a shady but naïve wrestling promoter. Some critics called it Dassin's masterpiece. "Dassin turned Londontown into a city of busted dreams and nightmare alleys," Michael Sragow wrote on Salon.com in 2000. "He mixed the fantastic and the real with masterly ease."

Dassin was assigned the film by the producer Darryl Zanuck just as Dassin was to appear before the House Un- American Activities Committee. He never testified, but testimony by the directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle, who recalled Dassin's Communist Party membership in the 1930s, was damning enough to get him blacklisted.

Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was "unemployable" in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct "Rififi," a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Dassin won a best-director award for the film at Cannes. By the time he wrote and directed "Never on Sunday," a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute played by Mercouri, the anti-Communist campaign in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.