Honestly, I’ve been wanting to see Rififi for a long time based solely on its reputation. I had heard from sources I generally trust that this French film was considered the finest heist film ever made, a meticulously crafted flick with a long sequence without a word of dialogue as the thieves break into a jewelry store and go through their meticulously planned robbery. Small problem: it wasn’t really streaming anywhere, so I would need to buy a Criterion DVD to see it. I don’t mind that, but I need a special reason these days to buy a more expensive DVD, and Criterion DVDs are considered to be among the finest for film buffs.
Oddly enough, my impulse was to watch the film in French with English subtitles, and I was going to start the film as I did my daily exercise on my stationary bike, but something about the DVD menu combined with my remote made setting the film to French with English subtitles somewhat difficult, and somehow, I ended up with the default setting of dubbed English without subtitles. That was…unexpected.
For starters, though, this film is one of those works that no one expected to be much of a hit. Director Jules Dassin was an exiled American, blacklisted over an accusation of communist sympathies, and he hadn’t directed anything in over five years prior to making Rififi. The film was based on a French crime novel of the same name that Dassin didn’t care for much, and I can’t seem to find out much about, but François Truffaut, a film critic who later became a great director in his own right, also had a low opinion on the source novel, so for all I know, it wasn’t a particularly good novel. Then again, there is something of a history of trashy books getting adapted into classic films. However, Dassin did his best, co-writing the screenplay himself while working out the best way to make a good story out of a book he openly disliked. Additionally, the budget for Rififi was so low that Dassin couldn’t afford to hire a big name actor to star in his film, even playing one important role himself, while also paying the crew lower than usual wages. Dassin, who wrote, directed, and did a lot of basic production stuff, was himself only paid the equivalent of $8,000.
And then Dassin put together a film that became almost an instant classic, one that, as I mentioned above, is still considered to be one of if not the best heist film ever made. That sort of thing probably doesn’t happen all that often, but the one time I can think of it with It Happened One Night, a comedy that pretty much no one involved with wanted to make before it went on to be the first of three films to win all five of the big Oscars: Best Actor, Actress, Director, Screenplay, and Picture.
Now, at its core, Rififi is a heist film. Heist films, of course, focus the story on a criminal plot of some kind, almost always an elaborate theft of some kind, though some critics have argued that a prison escape may count. Many heist films have a standard formula: a mastermind of some kind assembles a team to generally steal something, they put together a detailed plot, and then perform the plot after a few scenes of the crew practicing. Many times the heist will fail, forcing the protagonists (who may or may not be professional criminals) to improvise and see if they can still prevail. Depending on the age of the film, the heist may or may not be successful, often with a twist of some kind involved, and most often an older film will show the protagonist will be ultimately unsuccessful if he (and it is usually a he in older films) is a professional criminal. I’ve seen more than a few of these sorts of films, and many modern ones go for the exotic like where Ant-Man or a team of magicians are the ones pulling off the heist.
Here’s the thing that perhaps makes Rififi so unique here: it follows that formula very closely, but the actual robbery goes off without a hitch. Aging gangster Tony (Jean Servais) is out of prison and hooks up with his pal Jo (Carl Möhner). Jo’s a family man with a wife and a young son named for Tony. A third gangster pal Mario (Robert Manuel), likewise married but also fairly jolly, comes along as Jo has a plan to rob a jewelry store’s front window in broad daylight. Tony, wanting a bigger score, contrives they should instead break in at night and rob the safe for an even bigger score. That means they’ll need a safecracker, and Mario knows one, a fellow Italian named César (director Dassin).
As it is, Rififi is at its best when it’s either planning or pulling off the heist, though the film does a good job of showing something of what sort of life each of the four criminals lead. Jo’s life is a fairly mundane domestic existence with his wife Louise (Janine Darcey) and young son Tonio (Dominique Maurin). Mario’s home life seems, for lack of a better word, a lot more sexy as his wife Ida (Claude Sylvain) is first seen playing a game of sorts with him in a bathtub, and she’s a lot more accepting of his life than Louise is of Jo’s in that Louise offers some criticism of her husband’s career choices late in the film. César is mostly trying to woo a nightclub singer, a move that will bring the gang down. And Tony? Well, he finds his ex Mado (Marie Sabouret) didn’t exactly wait for him to get out of prison and has taken up with a rival gang member. Tony more or less forces her to follow him home where he has her strip down before beating her with a belt for her unfaithfulness. That was actually a pretty darn effective scene. It’s creepy and wrong, but Mado’s presumed nudity happens off-screen, and as Tony goes to start beating her, Dassin’s camera lingers on a photograph hanging on the wall behind where Tony was standing, showing Tony and Mado, happier and even looking noticeably younger. If anything, it’s noteworthy that of all the things Tony got rid of when he got out of prison, according to his own account, he opted to keep that photograph.
Oddly enough, Mado will be a lot loyaler to Tony in the end than her new lover, rival gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), starting with when he demands to know where her new back scars came from and including when he wants to know if she knows anything about the jewelry heist that is the film’s centerpiece.
And what a heist it is. It’s not so much flashy as it is a sign that these guys are true professionals. César had looked around the place and made note of the sort of safe and burglar alarm the store has. Having procured their own models to practice on, the gang has the most problems figuring out how to beat the super-sensitive alarm. That leads to trial and error as they look over different methods to stop the alarm, and they ultimately succeed. From there, the film has the famous half-hour, dialogue free heist scene as the gang waits for the store to close, and, having rented an upstairs apartment, drill through the floor, silence the alarm, and then crack the safe. The men are professionals who know their jobs, and their plan, though somewhat elaborate (though not when compared to, say, any time Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt needs to break into anything), was well-rehearsed by men who know what they were doing. Apparently, the heist went off so well, the film was banned in multiple countries to prevent people from trying it out for themselves.
It’s actually the fact that they are successful that gets them all killed as Pierre Grutter, head of his own gang and owner of the nightclub some of the guys like to frequent, decides he wants the huge fortune for himself, and man, I think I know why Jimmy had all the Lufthansa Heist guys killed in Goodfellas. While the plan was to fence the goods, more than one of the men gives a single item to a woman he’s smitten with, and while Mado has plenty of reason to give away Tony, it is the singer César was romancing who is the one who gets the group caught, and that was more through dumb luck. César is beaten until he reveals all, leading to his eventual death at a reluctant Tony’s hand for violating “the rules”. Mario and his wife are killed by one of Pierre’s brothers for not talking. Jo’s young son is kidnapped and held for ransom, a move that gets Jo killed when he shows up with the ransom, not knowing Tony has already saved the boy (with help from Mado), and Tony has already killed most of the opposing gang by then, including Pierre’s criminal brothers. Tony himself dies slowly from a gunshot wound he received while shooting Pierre, his last act being returning Tonio to Louise before he dies behind the wheel of his car. The crime may have gone off without a hitch, but that didn’t mean the men got away with it.
I’m not really the most knowledgeable on the heist film, so while I am reluctant to say this one is the best of its kind, I will say it’s an excellent example of the genre. That said, I am curious about one thing: why did the English dub give Mario and César these bad Italian accents? None of the other characters have weird accents. Man, I knew I should have watched this in French with English subtitles…
NEXT: I just finished a foreign language film I hadn’t seen before. Next time is a foreign language film I have seen before. Be back soon for Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 adaptation of my favorite Shakespeare play, Ran.
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