Sunday, January 12, 2020

#115 - Rififi


Ayee....now we're back - excellent Film Noir from France and a blacklisted American Director.

Rififi is a heist film - probably an inspiration for a lot of heist films and maybe even a few heists.  This film, starring a mostly unknown cast, was offered to blacklisted director Jules Dassin who despite not liking the source material, ended up making a stellar film.

I had never heard of it but it's probably one of the best heist movies I've seen with a 30 minute sequence done almost entirely in silence without dialogue or music and the whole time you're going "whoa" and wondering how things are going to play out.

I can't talk much about the plot except to say that it supposedly inspired Oceans 11, and that would make total sense to me

Another great part of the story is the interview Dassin gives where he talks about how he was treated after the Blacklist, and how afterwards, in Europe, he was free from MGM, the Hollywood machine, and the men who could take his career away - he got a 2nd act in Europe, and that's pretty cool to me considering how bullshit the Blacklist years were.

Good film - worth a blu-ray watch

BTW, Rififi doesn't exactly translate but "pitched battle amongst the men" is sort of where it goes - and it inspired a number of other Rififi titled films based on the author's novels - cool little thing there

RB

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