Film director who made European hits such as Never on Sunday after being blacklisted by Hollywood's anti-communists
Jules Dassin's career had two distinct phases. During the 1940s he worked in Hollywood, gaining a reputation for tough, realistic thrillers, but he was blacklisted because of his communist past and forced to start afresh in Europe, where several of his films starred his second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, later Minister of Culture in Athens.
Dassin set more value on his later work, over which he had greater artistic control, than his Hollywood pictures made under the constraints of the studio system. But the critical verdict has been the other way round, preferring the disciplined craftsmanship of Brute Force or The Naked City to the more ambitious and self-indulgent films of his European period.
He was born in 1911 into a Jewish immigrant family of Russian-French origin and brought up in the Bronx. He studied drama in Europe, became an actor with the Yiddish Theatre in New York and wrote radio scripts before going to Hollywood in 1940. He started as an assistant director, made short films for MGM and then turned to features, his first being Nazi Agent, a spy thriller with Conrad Veidt.
His early films covered a range of subjects and included a version of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost, featuring Charles Laughton. But after teaming up with the producer Mark Hellinger, a proponent of cinematic realism, he found his niche with contemporary crime dramas, notable for their brisk pace, raw violence and authentic atmosphere created by location shooting.
Brute Force (1947) dealt with a prison revolt led by Burt Lancaster, and The Naked City (1948) followed with almost documentary precision a police murder hunt on the streets of New York. It spawned a successful television series. These were followed by Thieves' Highway, a revenge story with Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb set in the San Francisco fruit market.
In 1950 Dassin came to Britain to make Night and the City, a fascinating attempt to use American thriller techniques in a London setting. The city itself was brilliantly evoked in the shadowy photography associated with film noir, but the mixture of American and British actors was not entirely happy. Richard Widmark (obituary, March 27) starred as a conman on the run.
In the next year Dassin was named as a communist by a fellow director, Edward Dmytryck, to the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating supposed communist subversion of Hollywood. Subpoenaed by the committee, Dassin, who had briefly been a member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, refused to declare his political allegiances and was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios.
He went into exile in France where in 1955 he made Rififi, his first film after a gap of nearly five years. Under the pseudonym Pero Vita, Dassin himself played one of a gang of thieves carrying out a jewel robbery in Paris and he daringly shot the central sequence, lasting 25 minutes, without dialogue. The film won Dassin the director's prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Celui qui doit mourir (He Who Must Die, l957), about the staging of the passion play in a Greek village, marked an abrupt change of direction. It was his first film with Mercouri, who played Mary Magdalene. They went on to make two modern treatments of classical mythology, Phaedre and A Dream of Passion, based on the story of Medea.
But none could match the huge commercial success of Never on Sunday (l960), the story of a prostitute taken Pygmalion-like under the wing of an American scholar, played by Dassin in another of his occasional forays into acting. With a catchy theme tune by Manos Hadjidakis and a flamboyant performance from Mercouri, it became one of the few Greek films to gain a worldwide following.
It also eased the way for Dassin's return to the United States. Here, in 1964, the blacklist forgotten, he made Topkapi, an enjoyable comedy-thriller from the novel by Eric Ambler. A caper story about a robbery at the Istanbul museum, it won an Oscar for Peter Ustinov as one of the thieves. In 1967 Dassin produced a Broadway stage version of Never on Sunday, for which Mercouri won a Tony Award.
Later films were mainly disappointing. There was 10.30 PM Summer, a pretentious rendering of a Marguerite Duras novel, Up Tight, an attempt to remake John Ford's The Informer in the context of black American politics, and Promise at Dawn, from Romain Gary's memoir of his Russian actress mother.
His last film, Circle of Two, was made in Canada in 1980, and charted a love affair between a 60-year-old artist (Richard Burton) and a teenage girl. It was an uncharacteristic subject for Dassin and showed him well below his best form.
Dassin's first marriage, in 1933 to Beatrice Launer, ended in divorce in 1962. It produced a son and two daughters. He married Melina Mercouri in 1966 and she died of cancer in 1994.
Jules Dassin, film director, was born on December 8, 1911. He died on March 31, 2008, aged 96
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