After serving five years in prison, Tony (Jean Servais) architects a smash and grab jewel robbery his former partner Jo (Carl Mohner) was planning into an elaborate and meticulously planned-out heist – which takes up 30 minutes of tension building, dialogue-less screen time – only to have the spoils of their ill-begotten gains become the target of a rival gangster Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who will even resort to kidnapping a child to get his hands on Tony’s haul. The aftermath is bloody and the street justice swift.
The Godfather of all heist films, Jules Dassin’s Rififi is widely regarded as the most influential film of the genre, with its fingerprints detected in the works of cinematic luminaries such as Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Upon being blacklisted in Hollywood, American actor and director Julius “Jules” Dassin set out to rebuild his career in Europe, and after adapting August Le Breton’s novel into a screenplay, Dassin turned a modest 200K budget into a masterpiece – transforming the City of Light into a black and white noir underworld – with an “honor among thieves” thematic allegory for McCarthyism. In French with English subtitles
“A milestone in movie history.” – Roger Ebert
“This is perhaps the keenest crime film that ever came from France,” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
“One of the great crime thrillers, the benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against, it’s no musty museum piece but a driving, compelling piece of work, redolent of the air of human frailty and fatalistic doom.” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
