Last Updated: 2:20am BST 02/04/2008, Telegraph
Jules Dassin, who died on Monday aged 96, was an American film-maker driven into exile on account of his early Communist sympathies; he completed his best-known work overseas, first in France and later in Greece. He was associated principally with Rififi (1955), a French crime thriller famous for a half-hour robbery sequence devoid of dialogue or music and punctuated only by natural sounds. On moving to Greece, he formed a close partnership with the actress Melina Mercouri, who subsequently became his wife.
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Together they made a steady stream of films and enjoyed a smash hit with Never on Sunday (1960), the story of an American academic and a Greek prostitute who charges only what clients can afford and never works on Sundays.
Dassin, whose name looked French but was pronounced in the American way as Joolz Dass-in, was renowned in his younger years for a strain of gritty realism that did not long survive his expulsion from Hollywood.
In the immediate post-war years, under the influence of Italian neo-realism, he made three tough slice-of-life dramas - Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves' Highway (1949) - which helped to restore working-class themes and natural locations to American cinema after years of fantasy and artifice. The Naked City in particular, depicting a manhunt through the sleazier boroughs of New York, broke new ground in terms of realism.
His first two films in Europe - Night and the City (1950), made in London, and the French thriller Rififi - continued this approach; but, from an artistic angle, meeting Mercouri was a mixed blessing. A flamboyant, larger-than-life actress, she encouraged him in paths far removed from his original commitment to verisimilitude and working-class themes.
They collaborated first on He Who Must Die (1957), a Franco-Italian co-production based on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Christ Recrucified. The story of a Passion play in which the amateur actors assume the characteristics of their Biblical roles, it had a self-importance new in Dassin's work. It was the film in which he discovered Greece and began consciously striving for international acclaim.
Where once he had made taut, semi-documentary thrillers from scripts that achieved a kind of urban poetry almost by accident, he later focused on works that already enjoyed a literary reputation - not only Kazantzakis, but Roger Vailland in La Loi (1958), Marguerite Duras in 10.30 PM Summer (1966) and Romain Gary in Promise at Dawn (1970).
But he was a poor judge of their cinematic potential. All emerged as pretentious, highfalutin pictures bereft of recognisable human figures.
Sandwiched between these slabs of "high art" were two crowd-pleasers. In Never on Sunday he had the wit to mock himself, playing Homer Thrace, a naive American besotted with "the glory that was Greece".
It was the most attractive film of his later years and deservedly successful. The theme tune, by Manos Hadjidakis, became an international hit.
Topkapi (1964) was almost as popular. Taken from an Eric Ambler story about a raid on the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, it won a supporting Oscar for Peter Ustinov. Like Never on Sunday, it proved that Dassin had not entirely lost his sense of humour.
One of eight children of Jewish-Russian immigrant parents, he was born Julius Dassin on December 18 1911 at Middletown, Connecticut, though the family moved to Harlem when he was still young. He was educated at Morris High School in the Bronx and demonstrated an early interest in drama.
After graduating, Dassin toured Europe for two years picking up theatrical experience, returning to New York in 1936. In order to join the Jewish theatre companies then flourishing in the city, he taught himself Yiddish.
For five summers he was entertainment director of a Jewish company in the Catskills and he also joined the Artef Players, a Jewish Socialist collective, for which he appeared in several Marxist plays. By 1940 he was writing for radio... [Continued]
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