Rififi
Encyclopedia
Rififi is a 1955 French crime film
adaptation of Auguste le Breton's novel of the same name. Directed by American filmmaker Jules Dassin
, the film stars Jean Servais
as the aging gangster Tony le Stéphanois, Carl Möhner
as Jo le Suédois, Robert Manuel
as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César le Milanais. The plot revolves around a burglary at a jewelry shop in the Rue de Rivoli. Tony, Jo, Mario, and César band together to commit the almost impossible theft. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world.
After he was blacklisted
from Hollywood, Dassin found work in France where he was asked to direct Rififi. Despite his distaste for parts of the original novel, Dassin agreed to direct the film. He shot Rififi while working with a low budget, without a star cast, and with the production staff working for low wages.
Upon the initial release of the film, it received positive reactions from audiences and critics in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The film earned Dassin the award for Best Director
at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival
. Rififi was nominated by the National Board of Review for Best Foreign Film. Rififi was re-released theatrically in 2000 and is still highly acclaimed by modern film critics as one of the greatest works in French film noir
.
Casing the store, the group decides to drill through the ceiling from an upstairs flat which will be vacant on a Sunday night extending into Monday morning before the jeweler returns. The suspenseful break-in completed, the criminals seem to have triumphed. Without the others' knowledge, César has pocketed a diamond ring as a gift for his mistress Viviane, a chanteuse at Grutter's club. The four men arrange to fence the loot with a London contact. Meanwhile, Grutter has seen Mado and her injuries; Mado breaks off their relationship. From this, Grutter infers that Tony is at the root of Mado's decision; he then gives drugs to his heroin-addicted brother and tells him to murder Tony. Grutter sees the diamond César gave to Viviane and realizes that César and Tony were responsible for the jewel theft. Grutter forces César to confess. Seeking revenge and money, Grutter's gang brutally murders Mario and his wife Ida. Tony retrieves Mario's share of the jewels and pays for a splendid funeral for him. Tony goes looking for Grutter and finds the captive César, who confesses to ratting him out to Grutter. With regret, Tony kills César.
Meanwhile, Grutter's thugs have kidnapped Jo's five-year-old son Tonio, demanding that Tony give over the loot or young Tonio will be killed. The London fence arrives with the cash, which now seems pointless to Jo, who along with his wife, is tormented with worry for their son. Seeking the boy, Tony tracks him down at Grutter's country house and kills Grutter's brothers Rémi and Louis to save him. On the way back to Paris, Tony is told that Jo has cracked under the pressure and has taken the money to the house for Grutter. Grutter kills Jo, and then is killed by Tony, who is mortally wounded. Bleeding profusely, Tony drives maniacally back to Paris and delivers Tonio home safely. Tony dies in his car as police and bystanders close in on him and his remaining loot.
genre. Melville gave his blessing to American director Jules Dassin
when the latter asked for his permission to take the helm. It was Dassin's first film in five years; he had been blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities after fellow director Edward Dmytryk
named him a communist in April 1951. Subsequently, Dassin attempted to rebuild his career in Europe. Several such film projects were stopped through long-distance efforts by the US government. Dassin attempted a film L'Ennemi public numero un, which was halted after stars Fernandel
and Zsa Zsa Gabor
withdrew under American pressure. An attempt to film an adaptation of Giovanni Verga
's Mastro don Gesualdo in Rome
was halted by the US Embassy. Dassin received an offer from an agent in Paris, France where he met producer Henri Bérard who had acquired the rights to Auguste le Breton's popular crime novel Du Rififi chez les hommes. Bérard chose Dassin due to the major success in France of Dassin's previous film: The Naked City
.
Using his native English, Dassin wrote the screenplay to Rififi in six days with the help of screenwriter René Wheeler
, who subsequently took the material and translated it to French. Dassin hated the novel; he was repelled by the story's racist
theme in which the rival gangsters were dark Arabs and North Africans pitted against light-skinned Europeans. As well, the book portrayed disquieting events such as necrophilia
—scenes that Dassin did not know how to bring to the big screen. For the rival gang, the producer suggested making them Americans, assuming Dassin would approve. Dassin was against this idea as he didn't want to be accused of taking oblique revenge on screen. Dassin downplayed the rival gangsters' characters in his screenplay and made their ethnicity vague, with the name Grutter sounding possibly German
, Polish
, or Centro-European. The greatest change from the book was the heist scene which spanned ten pages of the 250-page novel. Dassin focused the screenplay around this event to get past the other events that he did not know what to do with. In the film, the scene takes a quarter of the film's running time and is accomplished without spoken words or music.
, an actor whose career had slumped due to alcoholism
. For Italian
gangster Mario Ferrati, Dassin cast Robert Manuel
after seeing him perform a comic role as a member of Comédie-Française
. After a suggestion made by the wife of the film's producer, Dassin cast Carl Möhner
as Jo the Swede. Dassin would use Möhner again in his next film He Who Must Die
. Dassin himself played the role of the Italian safecracker César the Milanese. Dassin explained in an interview that he "had a cast a very good actor in Italy, whose name escapes me, but he never got the contract!...So I had to put on the mustache and do the part myself".
Rififi was filmed during the wintertime in Paris and used real locations rather than studio sets. Due to the low budget, the locations were scouted by Dassin himself. Dassin's fee for writing, directing, and acting was US$8,000. Dassin's production designer
to whom he referred as "one of the greatest men in the history of cinema" was Alexandre Trauner
. Out of friendship for Dassin, Trauner did the film for very little money. Dassin argued with his producer Henri Bérard on two points: Dassin refused to shoot the film when there was sunlight claiming that he "just wanted grey"; and that there were to be no fist fights in the film. Such fight scenes had been important to the popular success in France of the Lemmy Caution
film series.
Rififis heist scene was based on an actual burglary that took place in 1899 along Marseille
's cours St-Louis. A gang broke into the first floor offices of a travel agency, cutting a hole in the floor and using an umbrella to catch the debris in order to make off with the contents of the jeweler's shop below. The scene where Tony regretfully chooses to kill César for his betrayal of the thieves' code of silence
was filmed as an allusion to how Dassin and others felt after finding their contemporaries willing to name names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This act was not in the original novel.
was hired as the composer
for the film. Dassin and Auric originally could not agree about scoring the half hour caper scene. After Dassin told Auric he did not want music, Auric claimed he would "protect [him]. I'm going to write the music for the scene anyways, because you need to be protected". After filming was finished, Dassin showed the film to Auric once with music and once without. Afterward, Auric agreed to remove the music.
In 2001, Dassin admitted that he somewhat regretted the Rififi theme song, utilized only to explain the film's title which is never mentioned by any other film characters. The title is almost un-translatable into English; the closest attempts have been "rough and tumble" and "pitched battle." Dassin said he thought the author had created the word himself to refer to Moroccan
Berbers. The song was written in two days by lyricist Jacques Larue and composer Philippe-Gérard after Dassin turned down a proposal by Louiguy. Magali Noël
was cast as Viviane, who sings the film's theme song. Noël would later act for Italian director Federico Fellini
, appearing in three of his films.
reviewer as a "master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking".
The Mexican interior ministry banned
the film because of a series of burglaries mimicking its heist scene. Rififi was banned in Finland
in the late 1950s. In answer to critics who saw the film as an educational process that taught people how to commit burglary, Dassin claimed the film showed how difficult it was to actually carry out a crime.
Rififi was a popular success in France which led to several other Rififi films based on le Breton's stories. These films include Du rififi chez les femmes (1959), Du rififi à Tokyo (1961), and Du rififi à Paname (1965). On its United Kingdom release, Rififi was paired with the British science fiction film
The Quatermass Xperiment
as a double bill
; this went on to be the most successful double-bill release in UK cinemas in all of 1955. The film was offered distribution in the United States on the condition that Dassin renounce his past, declaring that he was duped into subversive associations. Otherwise, his name would be removed from the film as the writer and director. Dassin refused and the film was released by United Artists
who set up a dummy corporation as the distributing company. The film was distributed successfully in America with Dassin listed in the credits; in this way he was the first to break the Hollywood blacklist
. Rififi was released in the United States first with subtitles and then later with an English dub
under the title Rififi...Means Trouble!. The film caused controversy on its release from The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency
. The film endured three brief cuts in it and opened with a title card quoting the Book of Proverbs
stating "When the wicked are multiplied, crime shall be multiplied: but the just shall see their downfall". After this change, the film passed with a B rating. In 2005, Variety
announced that Stone Village Pictures acquired the remake rights to Rififi; the producers intending to place the film in a modern setting with Al Pacino
taking the lead role.
, Rififi has been released on both VHS
and DVD
. The VHS print has been reviewed negatively by critics. Roger Ebert
referred to it as "shabby" while Bill Hunt and Todd Doogan, the authors of The Digital Bits Insider's Guide to DVD, referred to the VHS version as "horrible" and with "crappy subtitles". The Criterion Collection
released a DVD
version of the film on April 24, 2001. In the United Kingdom, Rififi was released on DVD by Arrow Films
on April 21, 2003, and on Region B Blu-Ray by the same publisher on May 9, 2011.
François Truffaut
praised the film, stating that "Out of the worst crime novels I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen" and "Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect." French critic André Bazin
said that Rififi brought the genre a "sincerity and humanity that break with the conventions of a crime film, and manage to touch our hearts". In the February 1956 issue of the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma
, the film was listed as number thirteen in the top twenty films of 1955. The film was well received by British critics who noted the film's violence on its initial release. The Daily Mirror
referred to the film as "brilliant and brutal" while the Daily Herald made note that Rififi would "make American attempts at screen brutality look like a tea party in cathedral city". The American release of the film also received acclaim. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times
referred to the film as "perhaps the keenest crime film that ever came from France, including "Pepe le Moko
" and some of the best of Louis Jouvet
and Jean Gabin
." The National Board of Review
nominated the film as the Best Foreign Film in 1956.
Rififi was re-released for a limited run within America on July 21, 2000 in a new 35 mm print containing new, more explicit subtitle
s that were enhanced in collaboration with Dassin. The film was received very well by American critics on its re-release. The film ranking website Rotten Tomatoes
reported that 92% of critics had given the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 39. At Metacritic
, which assigns a normalized
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average
score of 97, based on 13 reviews.
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times
wrote the film was the "benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against... It's a film whose influence is hard to overstate, one that proves for not the last time that it's easier to break into a safe than fathom the mysteries of the human heart." Lucia Bozzola of the online database Allmovie gave the film the highest possible rating of five stars, calling it "The pinnacle of heist movies" and "not only one of the best French noirs, but one of the top movies in the genre." In 2002, critic Roger Ebert
added the film to his list of "Great Movies" stating "echoes of [Rififi] can be found from Kubrick
's "The Killing" to Tarantino
's "Reservoir Dogs
." They both owe something to John Huston
's "The Asphalt Jungle
" (1950), which has the general idea but not the attention to detail." Among negative reviews of the film, Dave Kehr
of the Chicago Reader felt that "the film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out." Rififi placed at number 90 on Empire
s list of The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema. Critic and director
Jean-Luc Godard
regarded the film negatively in comparison to other French crime films of the era, noting in 1986 that "today it can't hold a candle to Touchez pas au grisbi
which paved the way for it, let alone Bob le flambeur
which it paved the way for."
Crime film
Crime films are films which focus on the lives of criminals. The stylistic approach to a crime film varies from realistic portrayals of real-life criminal figures, to the far-fetched evil doings of imaginary arch-villains. Criminal acts are almost always glorified in these movies.- Plays and films...
adaptation of Auguste le Breton's novel of the same name. Directed by American filmmaker Jules Dassin
Jules Dassin
Julius "Jules" Dassin , was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.-Early life:...
, the film stars Jean Servais
Jean Servais
Jean Servais was a Belgian actor trained at the Brussels Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, where he won the Second Prize....
as the aging gangster Tony le Stéphanois, Carl Möhner
Carl Möhner
Carl Möhner was an Austrian film actor. He appeared in over 40 films between 1949 and 1976. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and died in McAllen, Texas from Parkinson's disease.-Selected filmography:...
as Jo le Suédois, Robert Manuel
Robert Manuel (actor)
Robert Manuel , a French actor and film director.- Filmography :* 1935 : La Petite Sauvage by Jean de Limur* 1936 : Salonique, nid d'espions by Georg Wilhelm Pabst* 1937 : Orage by Marc Allégret...
as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César le Milanais. The plot revolves around a burglary at a jewelry shop in the Rue de Rivoli. Tony, Jo, Mario, and César band together to commit the almost impossible theft. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world.
After he was blacklisted
Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...
from Hollywood, Dassin found work in France where he was asked to direct Rififi. Despite his distaste for parts of the original novel, Dassin agreed to direct the film. He shot Rififi while working with a low budget, without a star cast, and with the production staff working for low wages.
Upon the initial release of the film, it received positive reactions from audiences and critics in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The film earned Dassin the award for Best Director
Best Director Award (Cannes Film Festival)
The Best Director Award is an award presented at the Cannes Film Festival. It is chosen by the jury from the 'official section' of movies at the festival. It was first awarded in 1946....
at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival
1955 Cannes Film Festival
-Jury:*Marcel Pagnol *Marcel Achard *Juan Antonio Bardem *A. Dignimont *Jacques-Pierre Frogerais *Leopold Lindtberg *Anatole Litvak *Isa Miranda *Leonard Mosley...
. Rififi was nominated by the National Board of Review for Best Foreign Film. Rififi was re-released theatrically in 2000 and is still highly acclaimed by modern film critics as one of the greatest works in French film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
.
Plot
Tony "le Stéphanois" has done five years for a jewel heist, and is now out on the street and down on his luck. His friend Jo approaches Tony about another jewel heist in which they and Mario would stealthily cut the glass on a Parisian jeweler's front window and grab some gems. Tony opts not to participate. Tony learns that his old girlfriend, Mado, has now aligned herself with Pierre Grutter. Finding Mado at Grutter's nightclub, he invites her back to his rundown flat. Mado has been well-kept, and Tony savagely beats her for being so deeply involved with Grutter. Tony changes his mind about the heist; he now accepts on the condition that they hit the jeweler's safe, not the window. Mario, an Italian, suggests they employ the services of his compatriot César, a safecracker. The four team up and plan a way to work around the ingenious alarm system guarding the jewelry shop.Casing the store, the group decides to drill through the ceiling from an upstairs flat which will be vacant on a Sunday night extending into Monday morning before the jeweler returns. The suspenseful break-in completed, the criminals seem to have triumphed. Without the others' knowledge, César has pocketed a diamond ring as a gift for his mistress Viviane, a chanteuse at Grutter's club. The four men arrange to fence the loot with a London contact. Meanwhile, Grutter has seen Mado and her injuries; Mado breaks off their relationship. From this, Grutter infers that Tony is at the root of Mado's decision; he then gives drugs to his heroin-addicted brother and tells him to murder Tony. Grutter sees the diamond César gave to Viviane and realizes that César and Tony were responsible for the jewel theft. Grutter forces César to confess. Seeking revenge and money, Grutter's gang brutally murders Mario and his wife Ida. Tony retrieves Mario's share of the jewels and pays for a splendid funeral for him. Tony goes looking for Grutter and finds the captive César, who confesses to ratting him out to Grutter. With regret, Tony kills César.
Meanwhile, Grutter's thugs have kidnapped Jo's five-year-old son Tonio, demanding that Tony give over the loot or young Tonio will be killed. The London fence arrives with the cash, which now seems pointless to Jo, who along with his wife, is tormented with worry for their son. Seeking the boy, Tony tracks him down at Grutter's country house and kills Grutter's brothers Rémi and Louis to save him. On the way back to Paris, Tony is told that Jo has cracked under the pressure and has taken the money to the house for Grutter. Grutter kills Jo, and then is killed by Tony, who is mortally wounded. Bleeding profusely, Tony drives maniacally back to Paris and delivers Tonio home safely. Tony dies in his car as police and bystanders close in on him and his remaining loot.
Cast
- Jean ServaisJean ServaisJean Servais was a Belgian actor trained at the Brussels Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, where he won the Second Prize....
as Tony le Stéphanois: A gangster who recently returned from serving five years in prison. Tony is the godfather to the son of Jo le Suédois and is the eldest of the gangsters who are attempting to steal the diamonds. - Carl MöhnerCarl MöhnerCarl Möhner was an Austrian film actor. He appeared in over 40 films between 1949 and 1976. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and died in McAllen, Texas from Parkinson's disease.-Selected filmography:...
as Jo le Suédois: A young Swedish gangster who is under Tony's tutelage. Jo invites Tony for one last diamond heist. - Robert Manuel as Mario Ferrati: A happy-go-lucky ItalianItalian peopleThe Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...
gangster who accompanies Tony, Jo and César in the diamond heist. - Jules DassinJules DassinJulius "Jules" Dassin , was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.-Early life:...
as César le Milanais: César is a safecracker hired by Tony to help undertake the diamond heist. Dassin played this role under the pseudonymPseudonymA pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
of Perlo Vita. - Marcel Lupovici as Pierre Grutter: The leader of the Grutter gang. Pierre is the first to figure out Tony's responsibility for the diamond heist.
- Pierre Grasset as Louis Grutter: A member of the Grutter gang who is also the owner of the night-club L'Âge d'Or.
- Marie Sabouret as Mado: The former lover of Tony le Stéphanois.
- Dominique Maurin as Tonio le Suédois: The young son of Jo le Suédois. Towards the end of the film, Tonio is kidnapped by the Grutter gang and is rescued by Tony le Stéphanois.
Development
The film Rififi was originally to be directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, a later luminary of the heist filmHeist film
A heist film is a film that has an intricate plot woven around a group of people trying to steal something. Versions with dominant or prominent comic elements are often called caper movies. They could be described as the analogues of caper stories in film history...
genre. Melville gave his blessing to American director Jules Dassin
Jules Dassin
Julius "Jules" Dassin , was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.-Early life:...
when the latter asked for his permission to take the helm. It was Dassin's first film in five years; he had been blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities after fellow director Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk was an American film director who was amongst the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who served time in prison for being in contempt of Congress during the McCarthy-era 'red scare'.-Early life:Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada,...
named him a communist in April 1951. Subsequently, Dassin attempted to rebuild his career in Europe. Several such film projects were stopped through long-distance efforts by the US government. Dassin attempted a film L'Ennemi public numero un, which was halted after stars Fernandel
Fernandel
Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin , better known as Fernandel, was a French actor and singer. Born in Marseille, France, he was a comedy star who first gained popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues...
and Zsa Zsa Gabor
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Zsa Zsa Gabor is a Hungarian-born American stage, film and television actress.She acted on stage in Vienna, Austria, in 1932, and was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. She emigrated to the United States in 1941 and became a sought-after actress with "European flair and style", with a personality that...
withdrew under American pressure. An attempt to film an adaptation of Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Carmelo Verga was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in Sicily, and especially for the short story "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the novel I Malavoglia .-Life and career:The first son of Giovanni Battista Catalano Verga and Caterina Di Mauro,...
's Mastro don Gesualdo in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
was halted by the US Embassy. Dassin received an offer from an agent in Paris, France where he met producer Henri Bérard who had acquired the rights to Auguste le Breton's popular crime novel Du Rififi chez les hommes. Bérard chose Dassin due to the major success in France of Dassin's previous film: The Naked City
The Naked City
The Naked City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The movie, shot partially in documentary style, was filmed on location on the streets of New York City, featuring landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd...
.
Using his native English, Dassin wrote the screenplay to Rififi in six days with the help of screenwriter René Wheeler
René Wheeler
René Wheeler was a French screenwriter and film director. He co-wrote the story of the film A Cage of Nightingales with Georges Chaperot, for which they both received an Academy Award nomination in 1947. Their story would later serve as an inspiration for the hugely successful film The Chorus...
, who subsequently took the material and translated it to French. Dassin hated the novel; he was repelled by the story's racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
theme in which the rival gangsters were dark Arabs and North Africans pitted against light-skinned Europeans. As well, the book portrayed disquieting events such as necrophilia
Necrophilia
Necrophilia, also called thanatophilia or necrolagnia, is the sexual attraction to corpses,It is classified as a paraphilia by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The word is artificially derived from the ancient Greek words: νεκρός and φιλία...
—scenes that Dassin did not know how to bring to the big screen. For the rival gang, the producer suggested making them Americans, assuming Dassin would approve. Dassin was against this idea as he didn't want to be accused of taking oblique revenge on screen. Dassin downplayed the rival gangsters' characters in his screenplay and made their ethnicity vague, with the name Grutter sounding possibly German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, or Centro-European. The greatest change from the book was the heist scene which spanned ten pages of the 250-page novel. Dassin focused the screenplay around this event to get past the other events that he did not know what to do with. In the film, the scene takes a quarter of the film's running time and is accomplished without spoken words or music.
Filming
Working with a budget of $200,000, Dassin could not afford top stars for the film. To carry the lead role, Dassin selected Jean ServaisJean Servais
Jean Servais was a Belgian actor trained at the Brussels Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, where he won the Second Prize....
, an actor whose career had slumped due to alcoholism
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
. For Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
gangster Mario Ferrati, Dassin cast Robert Manuel
Robert Manuel (actor)
Robert Manuel , a French actor and film director.- Filmography :* 1935 : La Petite Sauvage by Jean de Limur* 1936 : Salonique, nid d'espions by Georg Wilhelm Pabst* 1937 : Orage by Marc Allégret...
after seeing him perform a comic role as a member of Comédie-Française
Comédie-Française
The Comédie-Française or Théâtre-Français is one of the few state theaters in France. It is the only state theater to have its own troupe of actors. It is located in the 1st arrondissement of Paris....
. After a suggestion made by the wife of the film's producer, Dassin cast Carl Möhner
Carl Möhner
Carl Möhner was an Austrian film actor. He appeared in over 40 films between 1949 and 1976. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and died in McAllen, Texas from Parkinson's disease.-Selected filmography:...
as Jo the Swede. Dassin would use Möhner again in his next film He Who Must Die
He Who Must Die
He Who Must Die , is a 1957 French film directed by Jules Dassin. It is based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis. It was entered into the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.-Cast:* Jean Servais - Photis* Carl Möhner - Agha...
. Dassin himself played the role of the Italian safecracker César the Milanese. Dassin explained in an interview that he "had a cast a very good actor in Italy, whose name escapes me, but he never got the contract!...So I had to put on the mustache and do the part myself".
Rififi was filmed during the wintertime in Paris and used real locations rather than studio sets. Due to the low budget, the locations were scouted by Dassin himself. Dassin's fee for writing, directing, and acting was US$8,000. Dassin's production designer
Production designer
In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...
to whom he referred as "one of the greatest men in the history of cinema" was Alexandre Trauner
Alexandre Trauner
Alexandre Trauner was a set designer.After studying painting at l'École des beaux-arts de Budapest, he emigrated to Paris in 1929, where he became the assistant of set designer Lazare Meerson, working on such films as À nous la liberté in 1932 and La Kermesse héroïque in 1935)...
. Out of friendship for Dassin, Trauner did the film for very little money. Dassin argued with his producer Henri Bérard on two points: Dassin refused to shoot the film when there was sunlight claiming that he "just wanted grey"; and that there were to be no fist fights in the film. Such fight scenes had been important to the popular success in France of the Lemmy Caution
Eddie Constantine
Eddie Constantine was an American-born French actor and singer who spent his career working in Europe....
film series.
Rififis heist scene was based on an actual burglary that took place in 1899 along Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
's cours St-Louis. A gang broke into the first floor offices of a travel agency, cutting a hole in the floor and using an umbrella to catch the debris in order to make off with the contents of the jeweler's shop below. The scene where Tony regretfully chooses to kill César for his betrayal of the thieves' code of silence
Code of silence
A code of silence is a condition in effect when a person opts to withhold what is believed to be vital or important information voluntarily or involuntarily....
was filmed as an allusion to how Dassin and others felt after finding their contemporaries willing to name names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This act was not in the original novel.
Music
Georges AuricGeorges Auric
Georges Auric was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault. He was a child prodigy and at age 15 he had his first compositions published. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Caussade, and under the composer Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum...
was hired as the composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
for the film. Dassin and Auric originally could not agree about scoring the half hour caper scene. After Dassin told Auric he did not want music, Auric claimed he would "protect [him]. I'm going to write the music for the scene anyways, because you need to be protected". After filming was finished, Dassin showed the film to Auric once with music and once without. Afterward, Auric agreed to remove the music.
In 2001, Dassin admitted that he somewhat regretted the Rififi theme song, utilized only to explain the film's title which is never mentioned by any other film characters. The title is almost un-translatable into English; the closest attempts have been "rough and tumble" and "pitched battle." Dassin said he thought the author had created the word himself to refer to Moroccan
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
Berbers. The song was written in two days by lyricist Jacques Larue and composer Philippe-Gérard after Dassin turned down a proposal by Louiguy. Magali Noël
Magali Noël
Magali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...
was cast as Viviane, who sings the film's theme song. Noël would later act for Italian director Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
, appearing in three of his films.
Release
Rififi debuted in France on April 13, 1955. The film was banned in some countries due to its heist scene, referred to by the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
reviewer as a "master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking".
The Mexican interior ministry banned
Banned films
For nearly the entire history of film production, certain films have been banned by film censorship or review organizations for political or moral reasons...
the film because of a series of burglaries mimicking its heist scene. Rififi was banned in Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
in the late 1950s. In answer to critics who saw the film as an educational process that taught people how to commit burglary, Dassin claimed the film showed how difficult it was to actually carry out a crime.
Rififi was a popular success in France which led to several other Rififi films based on le Breton's stories. These films include Du rififi chez les femmes (1959), Du rififi à Tokyo (1961), and Du rififi à Paname (1965). On its United Kingdom release, Rififi was paired with the British science fiction film
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...
The Quatermass Xperiment
The Quatermass Xperiment
The Quatermass Xperiment is a 1955 British science fiction horror film. Made by Hammer Film Productions, it was based on the 1953 BBC Television serial The Quatermass Experiment written by Nigel Kneale. It was directed by Val Guest and stars Brian Donlevy as the eponymous Professor Bernard...
as a double bill
Double feature
The double feature, also known as a double bill, was a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatre managers would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.The double feature, also known as...
; this went on to be the most successful double-bill release in UK cinemas in all of 1955. The film was offered distribution in the United States on the condition that Dassin renounce his past, declaring that he was duped into subversive associations. Otherwise, his name would be removed from the film as the writer and director. Dassin refused and the film was released by United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....
who set up a dummy corporation as the distributing company. The film was distributed successfully in America with Dassin listed in the credits; in this way he was the first to break the Hollywood blacklist
Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...
. Rififi was released in the United States first with subtitles and then later with an English dub
Dubbing (filmmaking)
Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
under the title Rififi...Means Trouble!. The film caused controversy on its release from The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency
National Legion of Decency
The National Legion of Decency was an organization dedicated to identifying and combating objectionable content, from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, in motion pictures...
. The film endured three brief cuts in it and opened with a title card quoting the Book of Proverbs
Book of Proverbs
The Book of Proverbs , commonly referred to simply as Proverbs, is a book of the Hebrew Bible.The original Hebrew title of the book of Proverbs is "Míshlê Shlomoh" . When translated into Greek and Latin, the title took on different forms. In the Greek Septuagint the title became "paroimai paroimiae"...
stating "When the wicked are multiplied, crime shall be multiplied: but the just shall see their downfall". After this change, the film passed with a B rating. In 2005, Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
announced that Stone Village Pictures acquired the remake rights to Rififi; the producers intending to place the film in a modern setting with Al Pacino
Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy and Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, though he has also appeared...
taking the lead role.
Home media
In North AmericaNorth America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, Rififi has been released on both VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
and DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
. The VHS print has been reviewed negatively by critics. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
referred to it as "shabby" while Bill Hunt and Todd Doogan, the authors of The Digital Bits Insider's Guide to DVD, referred to the VHS version as "horrible" and with "crappy subtitles". The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection is a video-distribution company selling "important classic and contemporary films" to film aficionados. The Criterion series is noted for helping to standardize the letterbox format for home video, bonus features, and special editions...
released a DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
version of the film on April 24, 2001. In the United Kingdom, Rififi was released on DVD by Arrow Films
Arrow Films
Arrow Films is a UK distributor of classic, horror, and cult films on Blu-ray and DVD.-Arrow Films:Arrow Films is one of the UK's leading independent distributors of world cinema, arthouse, horror and classic films...
on April 21, 2003, and on Region B Blu-Ray by the same publisher on May 9, 2011.
Critical reception
Upon its original release, film critic and future directorFilm director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
praised the film, stating that "Out of the worst crime novels I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen" and "Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect." French critic André Bazin
André Bazin
André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.-Life:Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918...
said that Rififi brought the genre a "sincerity and humanity that break with the conventions of a crime film, and manage to touch our hearts". In the February 1956 issue of the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
, the film was listed as number thirteen in the top twenty films of 1955. The film was well received by British critics who noted the film's violence on its initial release. The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper which was founded in 1903. Twice in its history, from 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was changed to read simply The Mirror, which is how the paper is often referred to in popular parlance. It had an...
referred to the film as "brilliant and brutal" while the Daily Herald made note that Rififi would "make American attempts at screen brutality look like a tea party in cathedral city". The American release of the film also received acclaim. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
referred to the film as "perhaps the keenest crime film that ever came from France, including "Pepe le Moko
Pépé le Moko
Pépé le Moko is a 1937 French film directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin. It depicts an infamous gangster, Pépé le Moko who tries to escape the police by hiding in the casbah of the city of Algiers...
" and some of the best of Louis Jouvet
Louis Jouvet
Louis Jouvet was a renowned French actor, director, and theatre director.- Life :Overcoming speech impediments and sometimes paralyzing stage fright as a young man, Jouvet's first important association was with Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, beginning in 1913...
and Jean Gabin
Jean Gabin
-Biography:Born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in Paris, he grew up in the village of Mériel in the Seine-et-Oise département, about 22 mi north of Paris. The son of cabaret entertainers, he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly...
." The National Board of Review
National Board of Review of Motion Pictures
The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures was founded in 1909 in New York City, just 13 years after the birth of cinema, to protest New York City Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr.'s revocation of moving-picture exhibition licenses on Christmas Eve 1908. The mayor believed that the new medium...
nominated the film as the Best Foreign Film in 1956.
Rififi was re-released for a limited run within America on July 21, 2000 in a new 35 mm print containing new, more explicit subtitle
Subtitle (captioning)
Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...
s that were enhanced in collaboration with Dassin. The film was received very well by American critics on its re-release. The film ranking website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 92% of critics had given the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 39. At Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...
rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average
Weighted mean
The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...
score of 97, based on 13 reviews.
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
wrote the film was the "benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against... It's a film whose influence is hard to overstate, one that proves for not the last time that it's easier to break into a safe than fathom the mysteries of the human heart." Lucia Bozzola of the online database Allmovie gave the film the highest possible rating of five stars, calling it "The pinnacle of heist movies" and "not only one of the best French noirs, but one of the top movies in the genre." In 2002, critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
added the film to his list of "Great Movies" stating "echoes of [Rififi] can be found from Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's "The Killing" to Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
's "Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs is an American crime film marking debut of director and writer Quentin Tarantino. It depicts the events before and after a botched diamond heist, but not the heist itself. Reservoir Dogs stars an ensemble cast: Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and...
." They both owe something to John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
's "The Asphalt Jungle
The Asphalt Jungle
The Asphalt Jungle is a 1950 film noir directed by John Huston. The caper film is based on the novel of the same name by W. R. Burnett and stars an ensemble cast including Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern, James Whitmore, and, in a minor but key role, Marilyn Monroe, an unknown...
" (1950), which has the general idea but not the attention to detail." Among negative reviews of the film, Dave Kehr
Dave Kehr
Dave Kehr is an American film critic. A critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune for many years, he writes a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases, in addition to contributing occasional pieces on individual films or filmmakers.-Early life and education:Dave Kehr did...
of the Chicago Reader felt that "the film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out." Rififi placed at number 90 on Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
s list of The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema. Critic and director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
regarded the film negatively in comparison to other French crime films of the era, noting in 1986 that "today it can't hold a candle to Touchez pas au grisbi
Touchez pas au grisbi
Touchez pas au grisbi is a 1954 French crime film directed by Jacques Becker and starring Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura, Dora Doll, Delia Scala, René Dary, and Miss America 1946, Marilyn Buferd...
which paved the way for it, let alone Bob le flambeur
Bob le flambeur
Bob le flambeur is a 1956 French gangster film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The film stars Roger Duchesne as Bob...
which it paved the way for."
External links
- Rififi at MetacriticMetacriticMetacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...