Word: dassin
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Dates: during 2008-2008
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...When called by Congress to testify about his early membership in the Communist Party, Dassin skipped to London, where Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck let him shoot the Brit-noir Night and the City. It stars Richard Widmark (who died, also in his 90s, a week before Dassin) as an American tout aiming for the big score, then fleeing from its consequences. In his goon period, with that weird smile (his upper lip raised as if by invisible fish hooks), and outfitted in a checkered jacket so loud it practically barks, Widmark is the perfect sucker in a nightscape made...
...This was also Dassin's first displaced-person movie; you'll understand why, seeing as how the directed was essentially deported from his native country and home industry. He would keep convening foreigners - American, Italian, German, Swiss, Russian - to make mischief in exotic locales: in London (Night and the City), Paris (Rififi), Athens (Never on Sunday), Istanbul (Topkapi). These films were the fictionalized diary of a wandering soul; for Dassin, geography was autobiography...
...muscular Gilles Segal, as the acrobat whose job is to be lowered by rope into the hall from a high window, then remove the case, nick the scimitar and replace the case, all without touching the electronically sensitive floor. It's a swell exercise in suspense, and one of Dassin's finest illustrations of men at work, but it doesn't come till 85 mins. into the movie. Most of the rest is airy banter, suggesting that Dassin & Co.had a better time making Topkapi than most people do watching it. Sober...
...Dassin made another seven movies, including Survival 1967, a documentary on the Arab-Israeli war. He did a flaccid adaptation off a Marguerite Duras novel, 10:30 P.M. Summer, and returned to the U.S. for Up Tight! (written by its costar, Ruby Dee). His last film was the preposterous Circle of Two, with Tatum O'Neal, then 16, and a dissipated Richard Burton, then 54, as lovers so mismatched they could be in the Guinness Book. It was 1980, and Dassin had outlived his craft. More sadly, he outlived his son, Joe Dassin, a top-of-the-pops Euro-singer...
...nice thing about movie careers, unlike movie obits, is that they don't have to be considered chronologically. DVD connoisseurs can play a director's films in any order, skipping the rhinestones, replaying the jewels. Jules Dassin had enough of those - The Tell-Tale Heart, Brute Force, Thieves' Highway, Rififi - as well as moments in many other films that shine like sapphires. And since this is a tribute to an unfashionable director, I'll end with an awkward confession, courtesy of my 17-year-old self. Once upon a time, I loved Phaedra...