9th
Rififi (1955)
Riffi is a heist movie with one great, prolonged scene of pilfering that will send most cinema nuts into a spring chicken heat. It’s a safe cracking scene, the sort of trite, well-worn Hollywood cliche that continues, well past its expiration date, to tool around the movie palaces. No one has the heart to tell it to go home. But the theft in Rififi, perhaps because the film is old and strikes the nostalgic grandpa-story chord of “once, robbery was entertaining,” actually gets the blood churning. The goods – expensive shiny shinys – are stolen by four French hoods in a sequence that, daringly, director Jules Dassin pieces together like an old silent picture. No music. No speech. Compared with the current saltwater sea of over-produced, overly loud action scenes, Rififi’s thirty minute sequence is like a handful of dry dirt to the face: it wakes you up and gives you hope. (The film itself is from a time when most of its audience could probably remember, vaguely, the coming of the talkie, and so the stunt was likely less self-consciously audacious and refreshing than it seems now; still, take hope. Many up-and-coming NYU students were in attendance at the screening I saw; perhaps the next Michael Mann will take heed).
This was the first film Dassin made after five years of suffering under the Hollywood blacklist, and that time away from golden-haired Hollywood must have been rough. A very serious, down-on-the-world man made this stone-faced film. Glimmers of mirth are so far between that when they do arrive their presence only highlights the film’s over-all grim and world-weary façade. The heist and one other extended action sequence are skillfully executed but lack Dassin’s distinctive good humor: they’re bracing but cold blooded. Only two scenes are granted the director’s normal vitality and dangerous sense of comedic timing: the head hood’s confrontation with his betraying mole, and a stool pigeon’s brutal comeuppance. An embarrassing nightclub number – executed in painful real time by slinky Magali Noël – attempts to explain the film’s title to American audiences. “Rififi” is the French word (perhaps invented by the novel’s author) for machismo. No one else in the film ever mentions the concept, and I suspect it would have been better to either leave it unexplained, or just change the title altogether (although “Rififi” is too iconic to pass up; like “Kodak” it’s just absurd enough to lodge in the brain). The film is worth seeing for the robbery sequence, but the rest of it is routine hardboiled genre; I got tired of the characters a few minutes after they were introduced. Bob Le Flambeur ripped this one off badly, but Bob remained charming and likable throughout his genre riff, saving it from the also-ran dustbin. Rififi’s characters are all humpty-dumpties: fragile egg shell men with nursery rhyme personalities. See if you can youtube the heist.
