DVD Tuesday: Best Heist Movie Ever? Rififi!
Rififi courtesy Criterion
DVD Tuesday: Steal this movie -- Rififi
is the crème de la crème of heist pictures!
Australian director Roger Donaldson's '70s-era heist picture
The Bank Job opens this Friday, and not only is it a taut, engrossing thriller, but it proves that
Jason Statham actually can act. He's not Laurence Olivier or anything, but his performance justifies my longtime (and much derided) feeling that, given the chance, he could do more than crack wise and flex his formidable musculature.
Naturally, I got to thinking about great heist movies, which inevitably led me to
Jules Dassin's unforgettable
Rififi (1954).
Rififi wasn't the first true heist picture, which I'd define as a film that is focused on the planning, execution and aftermath of a complicated and difficult robbery as well as on the complex relationships between the robbers. The first was probably John Huston's
The Asphalt Jungle (1950). But
Rififi was revelation when I saw it for the first time a few years back at New York's Film Forum - it lived up to its reputation and then some.
The film's weary anti-hero is Tony (
Jean Servais), fresh off a robbery rap he took so his young protégé, Jo (
Carl Mohner), could remain on the outside with his wife and small son.
His health ruined, his underworld reputation in tatters, and his girlfriend shacked up with a Montmartre club owner who moonlights as a police snitch, Tony reluctantly agrees to join Jo, Italian pimp Mario (
Robert Manuel) and safecracker Cesar (Dassin, hiding behind the pseudonym Perlo Vita, from the Italian phrase "
per la vita" - "struggle for life"), in robbing a fashionable jewelry store on the Rue de la Paix.
The planning and the aftermath are gripping, but the robbery is a tour de force: 28 minutes of near silence - not a word, not a music cue. The gang gets into the apartment above the store, cuts through the shop's ceiling and tackles the safe, using such mundane objects as an umbrella and a fire extinguisher to game the security system. The sequence is so tense that the slightest sound makes you jump like a nervous cat. And don't imagine it's not tough because it was made more than 50 years ago: It's lousy with junkies, sociopathic killers, child kidnappers and woman beaters.
Director Jules Dassin, the child of impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem, and dabbled briefly in acting: His credits ranged from Yiddish-theater walk-ons to a featured role in Oscar Saul and Lou Lantz's notorious Federal Theater Project Children's Theater parable
Revolt of the Beavers, which one dismayed critic dubbed "Mother Goose Marxism."
Dassin made his first film, an acclaimed 20-minute version of Edgar Allan Poe's
The Tell-Tale Heart, in 1941 and directed a remarkable string of noir classics -
Brute Force (1947),
The Naked City (1948) and
Thieves' Highway (1949) - before falling victim to McCarthy-era blacklisting, which sent him scrambling for work in Europe. After making
Night and the City (1950) in London, he went to France for
Rififi. Future director François Truffaut, then a critic for the influential
Cahiers du Cinema, called it the best noir film he'd ever seen.
I don't know that I can sell
Rififi any harder without setting up impossible expectations, so I'll stop now. But if you don't trust me, trust Al Pacino: He's attached to a remake tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release.
Things to Consider:
Does the appeal of heist films lie in the personalities of the thieves, or the how-to minutiae of beating the system by robbing a supposedly impregnable bank/vault/gallery/ whatever?
Why do we like charming rogues - what makes us root for guys doing something that most of us would agree is just plain wrong?
Are there any heist movies you like in which you
don't much care for the conspirators? For me, the prime example is Stanley Kubrick's
The Killing (1956): The cast is brilliant, the screenplay (which Kubrick cowrote with pulp genius
Jim Thompson) is brilliant, the sheer poetry of the darker-than-dark ending kills me, but the plan hinges on shooting a horse mid-race. I can't get with those guys.
Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
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TV Guide Talk.
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Movie Talk
vodcast.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Michael Clayton
Network
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Shoot 'Em Up
Freeway
A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
