RIFIFI

Shot on location in Paris on a very low budget, RIFIFI (1955) ranks as one of the greatest caper/heist films ever made. When American director Jules Dassin was blacklisted in the 1950s, he went to France to make movies. His first production was RIFIFI, a wire taut masterpiece of French film noir. 

RIFIFI follows all of the tropes of the caper/heist film. A ex-con plans a major score, the robbery of a Parisian jewelry store. He recruits a team of three men to assist him. His plan is elaborate, ingenious and meticulously executed. The men get and getaway with a fortune in diamonds and other jewels but, as they must, things go wrong in the third act when a murderous gangster and his men decide to steal the ice for themselves. The result is a high body count and an utterly bleak ending. 

Any and all of these elements would make RIFIFI worth watching. But Dassin ups the ante to 11 by filming a thirty-minute robbery sequence with no dialogue or musical score. The result is an incredibly suspenseful sequence that serves as a textbook exercise in pure cinema. It's brilliant, audacious and unforgettable. Director John Sturges did much the same thing with his cross cutting between escape sequences (all without dialogue) during the thrilling third act of THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has no dialogue for more than twenty-minutes at the beginning of the film.

Dassin made a string of first rate noirs in the United States beginning with 1947's BRUTE FORCE (for my money the best escape from prison movie ever made, so take that SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), THE NAKED CITY (1948), THIEVES' HIGHWAY (1949), and NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950). In 1964, Dassin made TOPKAPI, another first rate caper film. 

Brilliantly conceived and executed, RIFIFI stands as an incredibly influential work in the history of crime films, both American and foreign. Imitated and homaged but never equaled or surpassed, RIFIFI towers over the genre. 

Highly recommenced.