Jules Dassin, 1911 - 2008.

Jules Dassin, the American who directed the film Never on Sunday and was married to the late Greek actress and culture minister Melina Mercouri, died in an Athens hospital after a short illness on Monday aged 96.

George Hatzidakis, Reuters.

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s, Jules Dassin directed some of the better realistic, hard-bitten, fast-paced crime dramas produced in America, before his blacklisting and subsequent move to Europe.... The Naked City is one of the first police dramas shot on location, on the streets of New York; Rififi is a forerunner of detailed jewelry heist dramas, highlighted by a 35-minute sequence chronicling the break-in, shot without a word of dialogue or note of music... Brute Force remains a striking, naturalistic prison drama, with Burt Lancaster in one of his most memorable early performances and Hume Cronyn wonderfully despicable as a Hitlerish guard captain. Thieves' Highway, also shot on location, is a vivid drama of truck driver Richard Conte taking on racketeer Lee J Cobb.

Rob Edelman, Film Reference.

Updated through 4/6.

Dassin loved working with [Richard] Widmark, too. "I had immense respect for him as an actor," says the filmmaker, "and I lamented the way his career went. You may not believe this, but after we had this great experience on Night and the City, I wanted him to do Hamlet with me on stage. But he was terrified of the idea." Widmark fell victim, Dassin thinks, to the hard-guy typecasting the studios imposed on him: "Hollywood had trapped him."

Michael Sragow, interviewing Dassin in 2000 for Salon.

See also: Wikipedia.

Updates, 4/1: "He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with the Guardian in London," writes Richard Severo in the New York Times:

"You grow up in Harlem where there's trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant," he told the newspaper. "You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it's a very natural process."

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler....

He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr Dassin told Cue magazine: "Of my own films, there's only one I've really liked - He Who Must Die. That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn't mean I'm completely satisfied with it. I'd do it all over again, if I could."

Rick Staehling, one of the Intense Guys, posts a clip from Rififi.

"François Truffaut considered Rififi the best thriller ever, although all of Dassin's harsh, realistic, fast-paced and highly-contrasted black and white films were to grip a whole generation, the audience of the new wave, throughout Europe and America," blogs Agnès Poirer for the Guardian. "American paced and European styled, his films carried both force and sophistication, two qualities that are still as blatant today as they were then."

"Dassin's run of pictures between 1947 and 1955 - Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City and Rififi - was about as inspired as any director ever pulls off, and Dassin didn't break his stride of inspiration even as he was going into exile," writes Glenn Kenny.

The Self-Styled Siren takes a swing at that "slanted piece of crap" that was the AP obit.

"Brute Force, unlike Dassin's next film, The Naked City, is filled with an unrelenting sense of despair," writes Steve-O at Noir of the Week.

Updates, 4/2: "It was at Universal, under the aegis of the enterprising producer Mark Hellinger, that he made Brute Force, his first personal work," writes Tim Pulleine in the Guardian. "The populist, democratic impulse that is submerged in Brute Force is allowed to surface in his subsequent collaboration with Hellinger, The Naked City."

"Interviewing Dassin remains one of the highlights of my life, and I got to do it twice (both times with the help and contribution of the inimitable Bruce Goldstein)," writes Issa Clubb at Criterion's blog, On Five. "What still strikes me a few years later is how gracious he was. As a person, he belied the 'great director as tyrant' stereotype - there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to 'name names,' which I suppose would have been out of character.... I think another reason that Dassin didn't want to talk about the blacklist was to avoid being defined by it. He recognized, exile or no, that he did get to make quite a few movies and that they were damn good."

Online listening tip. Fresh Air revisits a 2001 interview.

Update, 4/3: "Dassin may have been 'a lively director in a minor key,' as critic Andrew Sarris once described him, but such terms are relative," writes the WSWS's David Walsh. "A brief look at his life and career serves as a reminder that Dassin and others of his generation in Hollywood, whatever their limitations, were people of some substance. They had known hardship and struggle, they lived through enormous historical events and these varying experiences left important traces in their artistic efforts."

Update, 4/6: "[T]he crime movie was just one item in the dossier of this fascinating, hard-to-pin-down ex-pat auteur," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "And Dassin lived long enough to watch the fickle swing of fortune's pendulum over and over until the movement became almost routine. It was as if he were a character in one of his heist films: top of the world one minute, disgraced and disconsolate the next, but always angling for the next big break.... It was DVD that revived Dassin's rep - not for the Mercouri films but for his early-prime crime pictures.... Yet a bunch of Dassin's major Euro-pix, including He Who Must Die, The Law and Phaedra, and his late-60s urban drama Up Tight!, remain unavailable on DVD. Some of his movies are so hard to find, they have not a single review posted on the Internet Movie Database."

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2008 2:13 PM