MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

Brute Force

(Zelle R 17 [de])

USA 1947
d: Jules Dassin
Image Entertainment (Region 0 us)

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Naked City

(Stadt ohne Maske [de])

USA 1948
d: Jules Dassin
Image Entertainment (Region 0 us)

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Despite its reputation, a rather overrated police-procedure thriller which has gained its seminal status simply by its accent on ordinariness and by its adherence to the ideal of shooting on location. In organising the hunt for a brutal murderer, Fitzgerald's detective is too winsome and hammy, Taylor's assistant merely wooden; thanks be then to Ted de Corsia as the killer, adding a touch of real nastiness and urgency to the admittedly well-constructed final chase.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"There are eight million stories in the naked city: This has been one of them." The investigation of the seemingly inexplicable murder of a beautiful young woman narrows down to two suspects who are stalked through New York City. But it is not for its one story that "The Naked City" is a landmark crime thriller. Carl Macek writes, in "Film Noir: An Encylopedic Reference...": "The Naked City' remains a prime example of Hollywood's assimilation of documentary style film making.... Functioning as a film policier, 'The Naked City' moves on the periphery of the noir sensibilities. Using on-location photography, which won William Daniels an Academy Award, 'The Naked City' tells the story of a typical police investigation embellished by the antielitism of Albert Maltz's screenplay and the crisp assurance of Jules Dassin's direction. The real star of the film becomes the city, which can take on a variety of personalities. It is truly a mysterious entity imbued with all sorts of stories and affectations. 'The Naked City' is unlike most of Dassin's other films, as it is a vision of the world that forsakes subtlety and deals almost exclusively with black and white absolute truths. There is a thematic elegance to Dassin's other noir films such as 'Brute Force', 'Night and the City', and 'Thieves Highway', that is absent in 'The Naked City'."
— PFA
•••••
When it comes to his most famous and influential American movie, "The Naked City," he likes mostly its look and its texture -- he says that otherwise the guts were cut right out of it. This Gotham-set police melodrama used real locales to create a juicy ambiance. As James Agee wrote about the New York of this movie (in an uncollected review in Time), "evil things go on there, but by and large the city is bursting with energy, grandeur, sunlight, human variety and an eager journalistic glamor."
According to Dassin, Garbo's great cinematographer William Daniels, who shot "Brute Force" and "The Naked City," was an alcoholic banned from studio work until Dassin approached him "clandestine" and asked: "Is there any reason you cannot make a film?" Dassin recalls that this celebrated craftsman, whose credits included "Greed," took a long time to answer: "I witnessed a marvelous thing of a guy reviewing himself. Then he replied there was no reason. [Producer Mark] Hellinger had him followed, but he never took another drink. Billy won an Oscar for shooting 'The Naked City.'"
Dassin did his final cut of that film in Los Angeles, and went back to New York to direct a play. But the former Broadway columnist Hellinger, who died a month later, from, Dassin says, "loving brandy too much," gave in to Universal and had the film re-edited. Juxtapositions of poverty and glitz, and of middle-class coziness and homelessness, fell to the cutting room floor. Seeing the butchered piece for the first time at the New York premiere, Dassin "walked off in tears."
— Michael Sragow

Thieves' Highway

(Gefahr in Frisco [de])

USA 1949
d: Jules Dassin
Criterion (Region 1 us)

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Jules Dassin's trendy reputation (and an awful lot of money) was made with "Rififi", "Never on Sunday" and "Topkapi" - triumphant European success for a blacklisted Hollywood talent. But cultists groaned, for the 'real' Dassin was surely to be found in the baroque and electrifying "Brute Force", the grotesquely Dickensian "Night and the City", and - a personal favourite - "Thieves' Highway". AI Bezzerides' script (from his own novel "Thieves' Market") and the performances of Conte, Cobb, and Cortese (in her American debut) help restrain Dassin's feverish artistic ambitions in this tale of racketeering in the California fruit markets. The result slots sleazy eroticism and rigorous action seamlessly together into a high-grade trucking melo. Nothing more, but nothing less, which in the '40s was the most triumphant kind of American success.
— CW, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Jules Dassin's preblacklist Hollywood pictures and one of the best noirs ever made by anyone, this is a terrific, fast-moving thriller about the corruption of the California fruit market business. Adapted by A.I. Bezzerides from his own novel, it has a pretty exciting cast as well.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
In "Thieves’ Highway", the montages of spinning tires and speedometers and wavy highway lines suggest not mere exhaustion but the testing of the hero’s soul. When a truck careens off the asphalt and bursts into flames at Altamont, it marks a spiritual as well as a practical defeat for the brotherhood of the road. The feel of this movie is closer to Nicholas Ray’s "On Dangerous Ground" (1951), also from a Bezzerides script, but that movie split in half, too, as part bristling urban-crime film, part rural redemption fable. "Thieves’ Highway", like Robert Aldrich’s 1955 "Kiss Me Deadly" (from Bezzerides’ free adaptation of Mickey Spillane), is all of a piece, with simmering undercurrents of violence, disgust, and impacted sexuality. Bezzerides’ writing at its peak boasts a dynamic blend of iconoclasm and bitterness––an ideal combination for the intersection of kinetics and moodiness that is film noir.
— Michael Sragow

Night and the City

(Die Ratte von Soho [de])

UK 1950
d: Jules Dassin
Criterion (Region 1 us)

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Bizarre film noir with Widmark as a small time nightclub tout trying to hustle his way into the wrestling rackets, but finding himself the object of a murderous manhunt when his cons catch up with him. Set in a London through which Widmark spends much of his time dodging in dark alleyways, it attempts to present the city in neo-expressionist terms as a grotesque, terrifyingly anonymous trap. Fascinating, even though the stylised characterisations (like Francis L Sullivan's obesely outsized nightclub king) remain theoretically interesting rather than convincing. Inclined to go over the top, it all too clearly contains the seeds of Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Set in London's Soho district, Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" provides Richard Widmark with one of his best roles as Harry Fabian, "the artist without an art," a creative small-time crook who gets involved with the big boys (literally) when he concocts a scheme to corner London's vicious wrestling racket. The muzzled violence threatening to explode at any moment that characterized Dassin's "The Naked City" and "Rififi" is here intensified by the Widmark specialty--a tendency toward hysteria. Colin McArthur writes in "Underworld U.S.A.": "The Naked City' and 'Thieves Highway' might be mistaken for social realist documents, but not so 'Night and the City'.... the meaning of which is metaphysical. The London of 'Night and the City' has no temporal or geographical location; it is Thompson's 'city of dreadful night,' Warshow's 'dark, sad city of the imagination.' Its underworld is reminiscent of Villon's Paris or Lang's Dusseldorf: forgers, fences and gangs of organized beggars... The principal recurring image of 'Night and the City' is of Harry Fabian...as he runs through dark streets in a futile attempt to evade his pursuers. He is a pariah in his own society, the underworld, a man with a price on his head which makes even former friends betray him. 'You're a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man,' says the grotesquely obese Noseros (Frances L. Sullivan)... It is easy to see Fabian as the archetypal modern man...."
— PFA

Du rififi chez les hommes

(Rififi [de/en])

France 1955
d: Jules Dassin
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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Archetypal heist thriller, with a group of thieves banding together for a daring jewel robbery and falling out afterwards. Highly acclaimed for the 35-minute robbery sequence, conducted without a word being spoken, and for the generally downbeat atmosphere, it's actually rather overrated, lacking the tension, profundity, and vivid characterisation of similar films by, say, Becker and Melville. Like even the best of Dassin's work, in fact, it never penetrates beneath its fashionable, self-conscious surface.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"Rififi" (underworld argot for a violent confrontation) is, of course, most celebrated for the 20 minutes in which Auric's somewhat excitable music suddenly stops. In silence, punctuated by natural sounds, four professional criminals break into the Paris branch of Mappin and Webb from the flat above and steal 240 million francs' worth of jewellery (or 'ice' as we call the stuff).
This influential robbery scene, however, is only the centre of the picture, and what Dassin did with the Série Noire novel by crook-turned-author Auguste Le Breton is conveyed by François Truffaut's comment that: 'One of the worst crime novels I have ever read Jules Dassin has made into the best crime film I have ever seen.' ... Above all, however, there's the semi-documentary realism Dassin developed on American locations (the photographer Weegee was his technical adviser on "The Naked City"). This is a harsh Paris, shot in all weathers and without artificial light, that was to influence Jean-Pierre Melville and the Nouvelle Vague.
— Philip French
•••••
"Rififi" is that most hallowed of films, a film that contains a monument within. Like the Grand Hall ball in "The Magnificent Ambersons" or the pickpocketing sequence in "Pickpocket" or the crop-duster chase in "North by Northwest", the virtually silent, gleefully long heist scene at the center of "Rififi" is a tingling, ecstatic, sustained act of brilliance—a sacrament of the cinema. For an astounding 33 minutes, Dassin removes all dialogue, hushing the soundtrack to the mere sounds of breath—the accidental note from a piano is enough to stop your heart—as we observe the criminal team at work, breaking through the floor, silencing alarms, cracking safes, checking watches, and signaling each other. It is a scene you’ve seen before (shameless imitators have been cannibalizing it for decades), but you will never see it so purely, respectfully done as here. The fetishistic shots of the safecracker’s tools, the rope that comes out of the suitcase already knotted and ready for climbing down, the team’s proprietary language of hand-gesture, the justly famous (and I won’t give it away) conceit of the umbrella—all of these elements are so lovingly described, it makes you want to cry out.
— Jamie Hook