Rififi - Criterion Collection
by Jules Dassin
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alice Garan, Jacques Besnard, Jacques David, Janine Darcey, Pierre GrassetDirector: Jules Dassin
Brand: Image Entertainment
Primary Contributor: Servais, Jean
DVD: 2 Layers, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: Pan & Scan, 1.33:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-04-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Rififi - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: Gangsters and Dinosaurs
Summary: 5 Stars
This forerunner New Wave film shines a beam into the underworld of Paris in the early 1950's. Filmed in black and white, in clubs, streets, alleys and crummy smoke filled flats and back rooms, the viewer catches a fading glimpse of this city at the end of one era, on the brink of another.
A band of case hardened thieves and night crawlers and their weary, fish eye ring leader,played by Jean Servais,recently out of prison, conspire just one last time to knock over a very high end jewelry store in Paris.
Rififi breaks into new film territory by daring to include a long period in the movie with virtually no dialogue whatsoever as the thieves carry out their break in with painstaking detail.
Right from the beginning there is a sad foreboding and yet also a tense fascination as we watch them carry out their plan, complete with their own set of street-wise code of ethics. A sense of fatalism hovers over each character. In the end our stone cold leader, musters up a gutsy act of gallantry and love. The film's final scene of redemption adds another dimension to what would be an entirely predictable existentialist saga.
Summary of Rififi - Criterion Collection
After making such American noir classics as The Naked City and Brute Force, blacklisted director Jules Dassin went to Paris and embarked on his masterpiece: a twisting, turning tale of four ex-cons who hatch one last glorious heist in the City of Lights. At once naturalistic and expressionistic, this melange of suspense, brutality, and dark humor was an international hit and earned Dassin the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Criterion is proud to present Rififi in a pristine digital transfer.Hollywood's loss was Europe's gain when Jules Dassin fled America because of the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist at the end of the 1940s. His films helped bring the moral ambiguity of the postwar American thriller to Europe, inspiring a new generation of critics and filmmakers. Writing several years before he made The 400 Blows, Fran?ois Truffaut praised Dassin for the way his films "combin[ed] the documentary approach with lyricism," a method that would inform many of the new wave films of the '60s.
Rififi, shot on the rainy streets of Paris, is imbued with the same gritty realism that marked Dassin's earlier work in New York (The Naked City) and London (Night and the City). Jean Servais plays Tony le St?phanois, an aging crook whose thin lips and tired, seen-it-all eyes give him a look somewhere between Humphrey Bogart and Harry Dean Stanton. Out of jail after a five-year stretch, he joins up with a couple of pals to pull one last heist: a jewel robbery that is portrayed in such detail (including tips on how to silence an alarm using a fire extinguisher) that the film was banned in several countries.
The robbery sequence alone, which lasts for 30 minutes and is played entirely without dialogue, would be enough to ensure Rififi's classic status, but there's a lot more to enjoy, including terrific performances from Marie Sabouret as Tony's world-weary ex-girlfriend, and from Dassin himself as a dandified Italian safecracker with an eye for the ladies. After the thrill of the heist, in the film's final scenes when, with the inevitability of the best films noirs everything falls apart, Dassin achieves the lyricism that Truffaut admired so much. By combining the conventions of a caper movie with his own brand of bleak nihilism, he made Rififi into a film that deserves to be counted among the best ever made.--Simon Leake
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