It was a fractured career - and yet, writer-director Jules Dassin showed a talent that could not be corrupted
A Near Great
He is not considered one of Hollywood's greats. The career was too fractured for that, the films too few. It's a consequence, mainly, of that greatest of Hollywood hiccups - the HUAC hearings - as well as the resulting internationalism of his career.
It speaks volumes, however, that each of the countries in which he worked - the U.S., France and Greece - claimed him as their own, a testament to the incorruptible quality of his work, an oeuvre at once dark, inventive, energetic and hermetic.
Dassin Dies
Jules Dassin, the pint sized, parrot-faced progenitor of such near-classics as Brute Force, Rififi, and Never On Sunday, died this week in Greece (where he had become an honorary citizen) at the age of 96.
The Hollywood Years
The Connecticut-born Dassin began as an actor in the Yiddish theatre, coming to Hollywood as a writer-director in the 1940s. There, he showed an ability to work within the boundaries of genre while introducing both narrative and technical experiments: the kaleidoscopic storytelling in the prison drama Brute Force, the pre-nouvelle vague handheld camera and real-life locations of The Naked City.
There was also an aptitude for extremist, connotative scenes - who has ever forgotten warden Hume Cronyn beating a hapless jailbird to an LP of Wagner in the aforementioned Brute Force?
But a singular identity as one of the masters of film noire was not to be.
France and Greece
In 1951, fellow director Edward Dmytryk fingered Dassin as a communist, forcing him to flee to France. In retrospect, it was just as well. It was the French who permitted Dassin to make Rififi, the seminal cops-and-robbers procedural with the ground-breaking 32 minute silent heist that gave him an international reputation.
That reputation brought him to the Cannes Film Festival, where met Greek beauty Melina Mercouri. The rest of his career and life would be spent as her lead supporting player, both in film and in politics (the couple lobbied hard for the transfer of the Elgin Marbles from England to their native Greece, a gesture yet to be enacted.) Out of this union came two of the most authentically spirited films of the international-commercial-cinema period: the naughty farce Never On Sunday and the buoyant caper Topkapi.
Last Film
Dassin's last film, a sorry affair, was the doleful two-hander Circle Of Two, a prime example of what havoc shaky infrastructure - in this case, Canadian tax-dodge financing - can render unto even veteran talent.
Fortunately, almost nobody has ever seen it - leaving Dassin's considerable, if quilted, reputation in tact.
