Jules Dassin R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

Jules Dassin's only (?) UK film was the excellent NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) , starring Google Withers and Richard Widmark, who passed away last week

NIGHT AND THE CITY was recently released on R2 by the BFI, and is on R1 DVD from Criterion USA....



Film director Jules Dassin dies

BBC News
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film director Jules Dassin dies

American film director Jules Dassin has died in an Athens hospital after a short illness, at the age of 96.

Blacklisted in Hollywood after WWII, he went to Europe where he married the late Greek actress and later culture minister Melina Mercouri.

She starred in Mr Dassin's most famous film, Never on Sunday.

After her death in 1994, Mr Dassin fought to realise her main goal: the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin, marbles from Britain to Greece.

A spokesman for Hygeia hospital in Athens said Mr Dassin had been admitted for treatment two weeks ago.

"Greece grieves the loss of a rare human being, an important creator and a true friend," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in a statement.

Oscar nominations

Mr Dassin was born in the US state of Connecticut on 18 December 1911.

He worked as an actor and theatre producer before becoming an assistant to film director Alfred Hitchcock.

He was active in leftist politics and in the early 1950s his promising Hollywood career was cut short when he was named as a communist and blacklisted.

Jules Dassin (right) with his wife Melina Mercouri in Paris on 16 January 1966
Dassin and Mercouri campaigned for the return of the Elgin marbles
He met Ms Mercouri at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955 where he won the best director prize for his film Rififi. Its long heist sequence, without dialogue, became a template for many later crime capers.

He directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's Never on Sunday in which she played a prostitute with a heart of gold. He received Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay.

Mr Dassin stopped making films in 1980 after Circle of Two starring Richard Burton performed poorly at the box office.

Ms Mercouri was elected to the Greek parliament in 1974 and in 1981 the newly-elected socialist government appointed her culture minister.

After his wife's death he created the Melina Mercouri Foundation to continue her campaign to have the 2,500-year-old marbles that were stripped from the Parthenon returned to Greece.

"He will be remembered for all his good work and struggles with Melina for his campaign for the return of the marbles, which will continue," said socialist opposition leader George Papandreou.

[dremble wedge]

Oh dear, the director and star of Night and the City gone within a week...

[Windthrop]

A fine and underrated director - Topkapi and Rififi also deserve special mention IMHO.

[batman]

Originally Posted by Windthrop A fine and underrated director - Topkapi and Rififi also deserve special mention IMHO.

Thieves Highway too. RIP Jules.

[HitchcockScholar]

Originally Posted by julian_craster Jules Dassin's only (?) UK film was the excellent NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) , starring Google Withers and Richard Widmark, who passed away last week NIGHT AND THE CITY was recently released on R2 by the BFI, and is on R1 DVD from Criterion USA.....

Sadly,the version with music score by Benjamin Frankel has never been released on video.

[billy bentley]

Let's not forget "Brute Force" either. A massive talent worthy of much respect.

[stevie boy]

Originally Posted by Windthrop A fine and underrated director - Topkapi and Rififi also deserve special mention IMHO.

2 excellent films, great director

[dylan]

I saw Jules at the NFT a few years ago - I think the interview is on the DVD of RIFIFI. He said that when he was blacklisted and moved to Europe, everytime he landed a job the CIA visited his prospective employers and the offers were withdrawn. He got the RIFIFI job due to the intervention of a left-wing French film trade union.

D.

[julian_craster]

Jules Dassin: Maker of gritty thrillers forced into exile by the Hollywood blacklist

Dassin's sole British film, Night and the City (1950), was in fact his masterpiece


INDEPENDENT
Wednesday, 2 April 2008

The career of the film-maker Jules Dassin – from the cycle of realistically gritty thrillers with which he gained initial recognition in Hollywood to the embarrassingly high-falutin literary adaptations to which he turned his attention during his later exile in Europe – described a descending spiral which was more or less parallel to that followed by Joseph Losey.

Both directors established themselves in the cinema on the strength of early, distinguished theatrical work in New York; both rapidly mastered the generic codes and conventions of semi-documentary film noir; both were radical left-wingers, forced to quit the United States after becoming entangled with Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); and both, resettling in Europe, almost immediately fell victim to the perilous intoxications of "self-expression".

It was as though, having been blacklisted by Hollywood, Dassin and Losey were determined quite deliberately to expunge from their European work every last trace of those virtues – modesty of ambition, economy of means, energy of expression – for which their American films can still be appreciated; as though it were not merely political but, in a sense, artistic asylum which they sought in Europe. Yet, to paraphrase a celebrated witticism on the recipe for creation, aesthetic self-expression is, or ought to be, 10 per cent self and 90 per cent expression; and it was, in particular, Dassin's misfortune that his ambition should so decisively outstrip its filmic execution, that his rashly and prematurely assumed "self" should so flagrantly eclipse his capacity to articulate it on the screen.

On completing drama studies in Europe, the young Dassin had rapidly found employment as an actor in New York's Yiddish Theatre, then as a radio scriptwriter and as the director of a series of short films (the best of them being an eerie adaptation of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart in 1941), which he no doubt regarded as calling cards in the hope of eventually graduating to feature film-making. Only one year later he did so graduate, even if, until 1947 and Brute Force, his filmography (which includes an amusing Oscar Wilde adaptation, The Canterville Ghost, 1944) remained that of a fairly uninspired journeyman, one who was capable of applying his efficient if still anonymous skills to whatever genre came his way.

Brute Force, however, inaugurated his first genuine "manner". A brilliant prison drama of exceptional violence and viciousness, starring Burt Lancaster and written by the director-to-be Richard Brooks, its almost unrelieved pessimism already harboured the seed of the specious "intellectualisation" which was to mar much of his European work. There was about it a whiff of Sartrean existentialism, albeit in a debased form already familiar from certain self-consciously misanthropic French films of the same period.

The critical and commercial success of Brute Force allowed Dassin to direct two similar and arguably superior movies: The Naked City (1948), a painstaking procedural thriller whose principal character, filmed wholly on location, was New York City itself; and Thieves' Highway (1949), which intensified the horror of its urban angst by juxtaposing it with the placid serenity of an idealised rural landscape (the farmlands of central California).

Identified as a former Communist by one of the HUAC's "friendly" witnesses, his fellow director Edward Dmytryk, Dassin was offered no further assignments in Hollywood; and, like Losey two years later, he travelled first to England, then to France.

His sole British film, Night and the City (1950), was in fact his masterpiece, a bizarrely stylised thriller in which Richard Widmark found himself stalked by Dassin's camera no less than by pursuing mobsters and London, a notoriously un-cinegenic city, was transformed by warped angles and expressionistic lighting into a sinister chequerboard of villainy and terror. Then, after a five-year hiatus, Dassin smoothly adapted himself to the French style with what is perhaps his best-known work, Rififi, remembered still for its lengthy opening heist sequence played totally without dialogue, a sequence which has become a cliché through subsequent imitations (it was even parodied by Dassin himself, in the comedy Topkapi, 1964).

From which point his career stopped growing: it merely expanded. In the wake of his marriage to the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, he embarked upon a series of melodramas which were steamily "Mediterranean" in atmosphere and naively "cultural" in ambition: adaptations of Nikos Kazantzakis (Celui qui doit mourir; He Who Must Die, 1957), Roger Vailland (La Loi; The Law, 1958), Racine (Phaedra, 1962), Marguerite Duras (10:30PM Summer, 1966) and Romain Gary (Promise at Dawn, 1970). All of these aspired to a bona-fide art-film status that Dassin was simply incapable of sustaining, while his two commercial successes, Topkapi and Never on Sunday (1960), in which Dassin himself starred opposite Mercouri and whose naggingly catchy theme song went around the world, were presumably thrown into the mixer as comic relief.

Hence it was at the very moment when Dassin discovered "art" – like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain being belatedly alerted to his unsuspected fluency in prose – that he ceased to contribute anything of value to the movies.

Gilbert Adair

Jules Dassin, film-maker: born Middletown, Connecticut 18 December 1911; married 1933 Beatrice Launer (two daughters, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1962), 1966 Melina Mercouri (died 1994); died Athens 31 March 2008.

[D Cairns]

R.I.P. Jules Dassin « SHADOWPLAY

I've been writing quite a bit about him on my blog.

The Chills #5: What time is love? « SHADOWPLAY

[Lord Brett]

Originally Posted by D Cairns R.I.P. Jules Dassin « SHADOWPLAY I've been writing quite a bit about him on my blog. The Chills #5: What time is love? « SHADOWPLAY

That's a really interesting blog. I think I'll be spending some time on there...