The other day I rewatched Jules Dassin´s Film Noir masterpiece "Rififi" (1955), which now is available on dvd with fully restored picture and sound. And what a great movie it is! No wonder François Truffaut called it "The best Film Noir I´ve ever seen".
Here is a brief summary of Rififi (by one of IMD:s contributors), in case you have not seen the film:
After five years in prison, Tony le Stéphanois meets his dearest friends Jo and the Italian Mario Ferrati and they invite Tony to steal a couple of jewels from the show-window of the famous jewelry Mappin & Webb Ltd, but he declines. Tony finds his former girlfriend Mado, who became the lover of the gangster owner of the night-club L' Âge d' Or Louis Grutter, and he humiliates her, beating on her back and taking her jewels. Then he calls Jo and Mario and proposes a burglary of the safe of the jewelry. They invite the Italian specialist in safes and elegant wolf Cesar to join their team and they plot a perfect heist. They are successful in their plan, but the D. Juan Cesar makes things go wrong when he gives a valuable ring to his mistress.
The famous safe-cracking sequence, without spoken words or music, that occupies a fourth of the film´s running time shows Dassin´s greatness as a film director. It has been said that the Paris police briefly banned the movie, because they feared that it could be used as an instruction manual by real criminals. But Dassin does not in any way glamorize robbery or the criminals - on the contrary.
The great Jean Servais is outstanding as Tony le Stéphanois, and the other actors also are top class. Buy the dvd if you want an unforgettable film evening!
Here you can watch the wellknown song sequence in "Rififi":
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