It's time blacklisted US filmmaker Jules Dassin was nominated for an honorary Oscar, writes David Thompson
Jules Dassin believes more in circumstances and exigency than placing blame. After all, it was hardly his fault that, born in 1911 in Connecticut and one of eight children, he had to move with his father, a barber, to Harlem, because that was where there was work. "You know," he once told an interviewer, "you grow up in Harlem, where there's trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and you live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant. You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it's a very natural process." No wonder he became a communist. How was he to know that one day Americans who only knew Fifth Avenue or the better parts of Los Angeles would take fright and decide communists were a terrible thing? So, in the early 1950s, Jules Dassin had to go to Paris and then on to Greece. It was decades before he got back to America to do movie work, for a dud called Circle of Two, starring Richard Burton and Tatum O'Neal. As soon as Dassin met O'Neal, he told the people funding the picture not to make it. But it was too late. The people making the pictures always think they know what they're doing. And for most of his long life, Jules Dassin has had to heed their words.
Raised in the New York Yiddish theatre as an actor and then a director, he was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on the eve of the second World War to direct short subjects, and from those he was promoted to doing real feature films - even Reunion, with Joan Crawford, in France. But he made himself unpopular on that one by ridiculing meetings of grown men and women trying to find a convincing way for Joan, in wartime France, still to wear the kind of designer dresses her audience enjoyed. The studio boss, Louis B Mayer, used to kid him about being a "pinko" - which was OK in the years just before it became not OK. Indeed, in the wartime years, you could always remind Mr Mayer (born in Russia himself), that the US and the Soviets were allies.
Then a time came when Dassin complained that the Metro pictures he was working on were rubbish. He went on a one-man strike for a few months - though the studio continued to send him cheques. He grew bored and returned. Mayer called him into his office and Dassin found a room full of studio executives. Mayer told the pinko a long story about a racehorse. It was clear to everyone that the story had a heavy moral. What a horse! Two-year-old - he runs and runs. Wins a lot of races. Three-year-old - something goes wrong. The horse labours. He doesn't win any more. "Know the problem?" Mayer asks Dassin. Dassin doesn't know, though he feels a punchline hanging over him. "That horse had developed the biggest balls," says Mayer.
"They bang together so hard, he can't run." The room is silent. "So, my son," says Mr Mayer, his hand on Dassin's shoulder.
"I gelded him. And now he's winning races again." Here was a threat that might be worse than being blacklisted, so Dassin moved back to New York and teamed up with journalist-turned-producer Mark Hellinger, and made the first two pictures he is proud of: Brute Force (with Burt Lancaster, about life in a prison) and The Naked City (a cop story shot on the streets of New York, with Barry Fitzgerald as the lead cop). At Fox, Darryl Zanuck snapped Dassin up when Hellinger died too young, and he gave him Thieves' Highway to make - a terrific, tough thriller about the trucking business, with Richard Conte and Lee J Cobb.
Then, as the red-scare nonsense started to build, Zanuck sent Dassin to London (with stars Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney) to make Night and the City, a startlingly candid view of the capital. It was a brutal noir, much of it shot in real night, and a picture that should have ensured Dassin's future.
Instead, he learned that the people he most admired - writer Clifford Odets, director Elia Kazan and actor Lee J Cobb - had named names, and he had no chance of working if he went back to America. It was four years, waiting and hanging on in Europe, before he managed to get a picture to make: Rififi, from a novel by Auguste Le Breton, about a jewel robbery. He knew it was make or break. Dassin chose to do it with a long robbery sequence all without dialogue. To this day, it is a classic in the caper genre.
At the Cannes film festival in 1955, Rififi won a prize for direction, and the American authorities were very embarrassed. Not that they decided to forgive Dassin, who at that point had made five strong films in a row. But Cannes had another blessing. There was a Greek film in the competition, Stella, starring a flamboyant actress named Melina Mercouri. So it was that the American refugee threw in his lot with Greece. He married Mercouri in the 1960s and they made a string of films together, including Never on Sunday (which was a big hit all over Europe) Phaedra and Topkapi, another robbery film.
The Greek films are more relaxed. Truth to tell, Mercouri was an actress with a talent for overdoing everything, so that a director didn't have much option except let her get on with it. And Dassin loved her - which shows. In real life, Mercouri became involved with politics, trying to rid Greece of juntas and colonels, and she ended up as minister of culture. So, by the time it might have been safe to go back to America, the Dassins were committed to making Greece a decent democracy.
Mercouri died in 1994, but Dassin has settled in Greece. He knows he is more than a survivor; he's someone who made luck work for him without ever having to stand patiently for the gelder's knife. It is a pleasure for him, and for all of us, to have tribute seasons that bring his best work back.
If you're blacklisted, he says, you do what you can - just as if you were growing up in Harlem. But you don't look away and you don't forget, and since the early 1950s, Jules Dassin has never said one word to Elia Kazan. And while he has children and grandchildren born and raised in Europe, he remains an American citizen, horrified at what it costs to make a picture there now, and aghast at the way some critics praise comic-strip pictures.
A few years ago the Academy awarded Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar - as if he hadn't won Oscars along the way for particular pictures. It would be decent now if at some Oscar night soon the same body raised a glass to Jules Dassin. - Guardian News Service
The re-released Rififi is at the IFC in Dublin on September 13th