Jules Dassin... American film director and actor

Obituary

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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

Jules Dassin: Maker of gritty thrillers forced into exile by the Hollywood blacklist

Obituaries

AP. Dassin's sole British film, Night and the City (1950), was in fact his masterpiece

Wednesday, 2 April 2008, The Independent

The career of the film-maker Jules Dassin – from the cycle of realistically gritty thrillers with which he gained initial recognition in Hollywood to the embarrassingly high-falutin literary adaptations to which he turned his attention during his later exile in Europe – described a descending spiral which was more or less parallel to that followed by Joseph Losey.

Both directors established themselves in the cinema on the strength of early, distinguished theatrical work in New York; both rapidly mastered the generic codes and conventions of semi-documentary film noir; both were radical left-wingers, forced to quit the United States after becoming entangled with Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); and both, resettling in Europe, almost immediately fell victim to the perilous intoxications of "self-expression".

It was as though, having been blacklisted by Hollywood, Dassin and Losey were determined quite deliberately to expunge from their European work every last trace of those virtues – modesty of ambition, economy of means, energy of expression – for which their American films can still be appreciated; as though it were not merely political but, in a sense, artistic asylum which they sought in Europe. Yet, to paraphrase a celebrated witticism on the recipe for creation, aesthetic self-expression is, or ought to be, 10 per cent self and 90 per cent expression; and it was, in particular, Dassin's misfortune that his ambition should so decisively outstrip its filmic execution, that his rashly and prematurely assumed "self" should so flagrantly eclipse his capacity to articulate it on the screen.

On completing drama studies in Europe, the young Dassin had rapidly found employment as an actor in New York's Yiddish Theatre, then as a radio scriptwriter and as the director of a series of short films (the best of them being an eerie adaptation of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart in 1941), which he no doubt regarded as calling cards in the hope of eventually graduating to feature film-making. Only one year later he did so graduate, even if, until 1947 and Brute Force, his filmography (which includes an amusing Oscar Wilde adaptation, The Canterville Ghost, 1944) remained that of a fairly uninspired journeyman, one who was capable of applying his efficient if still anonymous skills to whatever genre came his way.

Brute Force, however, inaugurated his first genuine "manner". A brilliant prison drama of exceptional violence and viciousness, starring Burt Lancaster and written by the director-to-be Richard Brooks, its almost unrelieved pessimism already harboured the seed of the specious "intellectualisation" which was to mar much of his European work. There was about it a whiff of Sartrean existentialism, albeit in a debased form already familiar from certain self-consciously misanthropic French films of the same period.

The critical and commercial success of Brute Force allowed Dassin to direct two similar and arguably superior movies: The Naked City (1948), a painstaking procedural thriller whose principal character, filmed wholly on location, was New York City itself; and Thieves' Highway (1949), which intensified the horror of its urban angst by juxtaposing it with the placid serenity of an idealised rural landscape (the farmlands of central California).

Identified as a former Communist by one of the HUAC's "friendly" witnesses, his fellow director Edward Dmytryk, Dassin was offered no further assignments in Hollywood; and, like Losey two years later, he travelled first to England, then to France.

His sole British film, Night and the City (1950), was in fact his masterpiece, a bizarrely stylised thriller in which Richard Widmark found himself stalked by Dassin's camera no less than by pursuing mobsters and London, a notoriously un-cinegenic city, was transformed by warped angles and expressionistic lighting into a sinister chequerboard of villainy and terror. Then, after a five-year hiatus, Dassin smoothly adapted himself to the French style with what is perhaps his best-known work, Rififi, remembered still for its lengthy opening heist sequence played totally without dialogue, a sequence which has become a cliché through subsequent imitations (it was even parodied by Dassin himself, in the comedy Topkapi, 1964).

From which point his career stopped growing: it merely expanded. In the wake of his marriage to the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, he embarked upon a series of melodramas which were steamily "Mediterranean" in atmosphere and naively "cultural" in ambition: adaptations of Nikos Kazantzakis (Celui qui doit mourir; He Who Must Die, 1957), Roger Vailland (La Loi; The Law, 1958), Racine (Phaedra, 1962), Marguerite Duras (10:30PM Summer, 1966) and Romain Gary (Promise at Dawn, 1970). All of these aspired to a bona-fide art-film status that Dassin was simply incapable of sustaining, while his two commercial successes, Topkapi and Never on Sunday (1960), in which Dassin himself starred opposite Mercouri and whose naggingly catchy theme song went around the world, were presumably thrown into the mixer as comic relief.

Hence it was at the very moment when Dassin discovered "art" – like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain being belatedly alerted to his unsuspected fluency in prose – that he ceased to contribute anything of value to the movies.

Gilbert Adair

Jules Dassin, film-maker: born Middletown, Connecticut 18 December 1911; married 1933 Beatrice Launer (two daughters, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1962), 1966 Melina Mercouri (died 1994); died Athens 31 March 2008.

Jules Dassin

Jules Dassin

Last Updated: 2:20am BST 02/04/2008, Telegraph

Page 1 of 3

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.

	Dassin and his wife, the actress Melina Mercouri

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]

Jules Dassin, film director, dies aged 96

By Our Foreign Staff

Last Updated: 2:18am BST 02/04/2008

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© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008

Jules Dassin, the controversial veteran film director who fled the US during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, has died aged 96. Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, he earned a reputation as an innovative director and was one of America's best young filmmakers with his early work, including the films "Brute Force" (1947) and "Naked City" (1948). But as an active Communist who never compromised on his beliefs, he was blacklisted at the height of the witch-hunts on Leftists unleashed by US Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In 1949 Dassin left the US for Europe, arriving first in London, where he filmed "Night in the City" starring the American actor Richard Widmark, who died last week. The film is now considered a landmark of the film noir genre. After moving to France, he made the 1955 film "Rififi", which is best known for a 32-minute sequence safe-cracking scene, which features no dialogue or music and was rumoured to have worried police because it was so instructive in its detail that it could have aided thieves.

In 1960, Dassin made "Never on Sunday" - a story about an American in Greece trying to save a kind-hearted prostitute. Dassin was nominated for Best Director and Best Script, but did not win, but composer Manos Hadjidakis won Best Song for his work on the film, which is considered one of the finest movies ever made in Greece.

It was during the filming that he fell in love with Melina Mercouri, the famous Greek actress, and the couple later married. They helped organise Greek resistance among expatriate politicians and artists in Paris against the Right-wing junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. After Mercouri retired from film-making she entered politics, rising to become the country's culture minister in the 1980s.

She made the return of the Elgin Marbles, which were taken from Greece in the 19th century and are now on display in the British Museum, a lifelong quest. After Mercouri's death in 1994, Dassin headed a foundation bearing her name established to secure the marbles' restitution to Greece and was awarded honorary citizenship for his efforts in 1997. He had two children from his first marriage to violinist Beatrice Launer.

American film director Jules Dassin, maker of 'Never on Sunday' and 'Topkapi,' dies at 96

The Associated Press

Published: March 31, 2008, International Herald Tribune

ATHENS, Greece: American director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife Melina Mercouri starred in his hit movie "Never on Sunday" and six more of his films, died late Monday at an Athens hospital, officials said. He was 96. The cause of death was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only that he had been treated there the past two weeks. Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi," abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the Communist blacklisting era...

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.

American film director Jules Dassin dies in Athens, aged 96

The Associated Press

Published: April 1, 2008, International Herald Tribune

ATHENS, Greece: American film director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife Melina Mercouri starred in his hit movie "Never on Sunday" and six more of his films, has died in Athens, hospital officials said. He was 96. The cause of death Monday was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only that he had been treated there the past two weeks. Dassin, whose more than 20 films included "Topkapi," abandoned Hollywood during the communist blacklists in 1950. In 1955, he won wide acclaim for "Rififi," famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialogue. The movie won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met Mercouri. He married the actress-politician in 1966 and settled permanently in Athens.

Dassin directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's "Never on Sunday," in which she gained international notice for her portrayal of a kindhearted prostitute. Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis on Monday paid tribute to Dassin, whom he called "a first-generation Greek." "Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and a true friend," Karamanlis said in a statement. "His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."

After Mercouri's death in 1994, Dassin focused on her main unrealized goal: the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin marbles from the British Museum in London to Athens. "If there is anything I want to be remembered for it is for fulfilling Melina's dream," he told The Associated Press in a 1997 interview. Dassin's Hollywood credits include the wartime romance "Reunion in France" with Joan Crawford and John Wayne (1942), the prison drama "Brute Force" (1947) starring Burt Lancaster, and the detective thriller "The Naked City" (1948).

Dassin's 1974 film "The Rehearsal" is based on the Greek student rebellions that helped bring down the 1967-74 junta, which had forced him and Mercouri into exile in Paris. In 1980, Dassin made the Canadian-backed film "Circle of Two," starring Richard Burton as an aged artist with a romantic fixation on a teenage student. But Dassin was disheartened by its weak box office performance and never made another film. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, to a Jewish barber who emigrated from Russia, Dassin was raised in working-class neighborhoods around New York.

In 1936, he joined New York's Yiddish Theater and wrote adaptations of theater plays for radio. After arriving in Hollywood, Dassin worked as an assistant to Alfred Hitchcock on "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." A year later, he shot his first film, "The Tell-Tale Heart" based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Dassin moved on to make films at MGM, Universal and 20th Century Fox. Dassin, who was active in leftist political causes, was denounced by Hollywood contemporaries as being a communist enough to be placed on the infamous blacklists.

He moved to London to shoot his next film, "Night and the City" (1950). Dassin then lived in Italy and France before returning to the cinema with "Rififi." After meeting Mercouri, he began to build his career around her. In 1974, Mercouri gave up acting after being elected to the Greek parliament. She became culture minister in 1981 and served in the post for more than eight years, setting her sights on returning the 2,500-year-old Parthenon sculptures to their homeland.

After his wife's death, Dassin created the Melina Mercouri Foundation to continue her work. The main goal of the foundation was to push for the creation of a new Acropolis museum big enough to reunite the marbles held in the British Museum with those remaining in Greece. After repeated delays, the glass and concrete museum at the foot of the Acropolis is set to open to the public in September — with plaster casts replacing the works displayed in London. Dassin's funeral arrangements were not immediately available. He had expressed a wish to be buried alongside Mercouri in central Athens' First Cemetery.