His young protégé and friend, Jo le Suedois (Carl Mohner) suggests a jewelry store heist to solve Tony’s financial woes. Tony’s not happy with that development nor with the fact that he can barely make ends meet. Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) is an aging gangster who comes home from prison to find that his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) has taken up with Louis Grutter (Pierre Grasset), the leader of another crime group. The storyline is taut and the acting near perfect. Out of that came what is now considered a classic. See Mesrine for reference.) So they asked Dassin to make it a story about American gangsters. (This was, after all, the time of the French-Algerian conflict. The novel was a graphic story of French Algerian gangsters in the Paris underworld, but the producers were worried about a potential backlash. Things are what they are and if you’re rififi, you deal with them. It’s a macho, tough guy, in-your-face approach to life that could be described as gangster existentialism. The word rififi is French slang that in the movie is translated as “rough and tumble.” In actuality, rififi is more an attitude than an adjective. Along the way, he took some of the elements of film noir, added a more personalized and internalized characterization of the central figures, and helped launch a new style in filmmaking that became known as the French New Wave. In Rififi, Dassin used the skeleton of Auguste le Breton’s novel and literally made the story his own. His works included Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948). In fact, he found the novel on which it was based-with its brutal beatings, blatant racism and a dash of necrophilia-both bizarre and repulsive.īut in a fascinating interview that is part of the DVD package, Dassin said he finally agreed to direct because he needed the work.īefore he was driven from Hollywood because of his membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s, Dassin, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was considered one of the up-and-comers in the then-emerging film noir genre.
Rififi was the brainchild of banished American director Jules Dassin, who at first didn’t want to do the film. And, ironically, were it not for the infamous Communist witch hunt that drove dozens of talented actors, directors and writers out of Hollywood in the 1950s, Rififi might have never been.
We haven’t seen every French gangster film, but our initial reaction is to agree. Film critics have tagged this as one of the best French crime movies ever made, with some even putting it at the top of the list.
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