Rififi is a great heist procedural that sets the standard for suspense in showing a complicated theft. It’s one of the first films in which we watch the gang collect their information and tools with such studied precision. From a hotel window, Jo watches the neighborhood’s regular comings and goings, and we watch Jo through a downward tilted camera that puts him in the foreground and lets us see what’s outside the window in the background. We get the whole scene. The team methodically gets key castings, times car trips, cases the safe and tests the alarm system. But the crown jewel is the heist itself, a 28-minute study in how silence can make good cinema. Quiet beyond the moment they don’t need be, the quartet of robbers tip toe around the closed jewelry store, flinching at every sudden noise and hitting our nerves with theirs. Jules Dassin amps the tension here beyond that of many more technically involved heist flics.
But Rififi doesn’t stop at effective suspense. It creates an interesting character, the middle-aged Tony, and follows the challenges that he faces after he’s released from five years in jail. Like Eddie Coyle in Peter Yates’ movie, le Stéphanois here is no longer at the top of his game. In the first scene of Rififi, we meet him losing at a card game and unable to continue playing because he is out of money. His old reputation doesn’t have the value of hard cash with the other players, and a persistent cough shows his health to be broken. In addition, his girlfriend has long abandoned him, and younger criminals question whether he’s up to pulling off a job. Dassin’s Tony, though, isn’t a man who is ready to end his career at this point. Tony gives a severe, and unwarranted, beating to his former girlfriend, Mado, but he shortly has to reckon with his own injustice when he realizes that Mado’s still enough in love with him not to betray him. Tony also a passion for his godson, Tonio, and his love for the boy has an important bearing on the outcome of the film. As Rififi speeds toward its conclusion, we watch Tony draw on his past experience and connections to track down the people who have kidnapped the boy and to take his revenge on them. In Tony, Dassin gives us an aging man who can still grow and can muster himself enough to be effective in the world, even if he can’t ultimately sustain the effort.
Another important part of this beauty is Dassin’s cinematic technique. He uses low key lighting often to create gritty visuals that are a standard element of film noir vocabulary. Even early in the film, at the card game and, shortly later, at the café, we see rough men with their faces sharply cut by shadow. And accompanying this lighting is a persistent use of deep focus. During the robbery, for example, low key light adds drama while the expansive depth of field lets us watch and respond to the faces of several of the robbers at the same time. Dassin uses deep focus for other purposes, too. For example, when Mario and his wife Ida are killed, the deep focus maintains a same-shot, visual dialog between them as they face Grutter and Remi. In other scenes, Dassin uses depth of field to portray action without cutting. After a rapid series of cuts as Tony drives his godson home, Tony stops the car at the house, and the camera backs up and, too, stops. The shot continues without a cut, though, while from the back of the extreme depth of field, we watch the Tonio’s mother run to the car. The deep focus lets Dassin give us all this information in one shot so he can rhythmically reinforce the action.
One of the most effective of Dassin’s techniques is the way Rififi slowly moves from the stark, steady realism of the card game and the robbery to increasingly macabre visuals. Once the robbery has been completed and Grutter has started to try to grab the jewels, we encounter an odd tracking shot that shows Grutter leading César though an unlikely forest of floorshow props. The props separate as the two go through and close around the tracking camera, a claustrophobic shot style we have yet to encounter in the film. And we get a similar image when Tony later finds César there. The claustrophobia and odd props add to the sense that the characters are leaving the bounds of the normal and moving into another sphere. In another unusual image shortly after, Dassin places Tonio’s large, inflatable clown squarely in the center of the screen as the London fence brings his cash for the jewels. In fact, the fence even comments on the big, ghoulish toy and playfully punches it, giving the whole scene an unusual, menacing, surreal air.
Rififi is a dark, skillful blend of many compelling elements of film noir that goes beyond the genre to create a memorable film. Blacklisted in the US and working with a small budget, Jules Dassin creates an important crime film with more creativity than resources here. It's an effective cinema experience.
