Rififi (1955)

Original title: Du rififi chez les hommes

Tony (Jean Servais) has just gotten out of prison. He is now a bitter and at least half broken man, at least in part because his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) left him while he was inside and absconded with the loot of the heist he was in for to boot. After abusing Mado – who now has a new horrible boyfriend in form of gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici) – with a belt, Tony decides he’s going to go down in a blaze of glory. So he accepts the invitation of a buddy of his own young friend Jo (Carl Möhner), an Italian named – in a fit of deep originality – Mario (Robert Manuel), to help the younger men with a heist on a jewellery store. Instead of the smash and grab they had initially planned, though, Tony suggests they do something much bigger. Adding Italian safecracker Cesare (director Jules Dassin himself) to the team, they come up with a plan to get into the store’s rather impressive vault.

Thanks to excellent preparation and some cool professionalism during the job (imagine the opposite of Money Heist), the heist goes off without a hitch. The problems start afterwards, when Cesare, an inveterate champion of buying women who are otherwise out of his league, uses a piece of jewellery from the heist for his unhealthy hobby. Soon Grutter and his junkie brother Remi (Robert Hossein) are on our crew’s trail, and these men do not follow the handful of rules of criminal conduct even an abusive prick like Tony believes in.

There’s a reason why Jules Dassin’s Rififi is typically listed among the greatest and most influential heist movies – it’s pretty much a perfect example of the form, made by a filmmaker whose style to my eyes prefigures the hyper-realism of Scorsese and the detail-obsession of somebody like Michael Mann.

Quite a bit of the film takes place on actual grimy Parisian streets, but instead of mere documentary realism, Dassin’s eye for the often artfully artless looking shot, followed by the not at all artless looking next and often very dynamic (by mid 50s standards, not Michael Bay, obviously and fortunately) editing, turn these into an ideal of Grimy Parisian Streets that expresses the idea of the term just as much – one might suggest even better – than their actual reality.

Dassin’s ability to focus on the right details comes to the fore in the legendary, long, wordless heist sequence that produces great tension out of watching men at their (illegal) precision work. There’s a painstaking focus on detail in this sequence, as well as total trust in the audience’s ability to understand what’s going in it based on what it has seen in the preparation stages of the heist; both come together to create twenty minutes of incredible tension.

But even after that, Rififi isn’t through. At this point, you can expect a degree of slackening of tension in most heist movies – on the plot or the visual level – but this is not a film willing to stop and breathe for a moment. Dassin starts building tension again at once, this time, using quite a bit of the character building he has done in the first act to create the sling that’s going to throttle the characters, and goes through a series of suspenseful sequences that are just as tightly focussed and brilliantly conceived as the heist. This being a French movie, the characters’ doom does not feel like a moral judgement on them (in fact, modern sensibilities could argue that Tony’s abusive relationship with Mado could use a bit more of a moral judgement from the film), but as a result of the way the world works for any of us.