This is the first film I've seen by director Jules Dassin.
Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi)
With a reputation as such a seminal heist film I was anticipating something quite special from Rififi. The elements of a heist and it's unstable aftermath can be compared to some of my favorite films like The Killing and Reservoir Dogs. The former of which came out about roughly the same time and thus I'm not sure how much influence one could have on the other. Maybe because I've seen so many heist films now that run along these same lines, I was a little more bored at first and a little less surprised by the end at the outcome. Still it was an exciting film and I can see it's innovation.
One of the most notable portions of the film is the actual heist which is quite long and features no music, and no dialogue (the characters must be quiet. They are performing a heist after all). It shows many steps of the mechanics of the heist in real time. This makes you feel like you are really there and builds suspense. Although there is also no false sense of suspense that can come from music. This kind of plays with you as the audience since you don't know if you should expect danger or not. The way it's portrayed like this reminds me of the depiction of making the escape tunnel in another great French film I saw recently Le Trou. Also, the actual mechanics of heist reminds me a bit of Sexy Beast which is another pretty good heist movie. I feel like I've seen at least one television special about a real life heist that looked something like this too. I wonder if anyone got any idea from watching this movie.
I think the Italian film Big Deal on Madonna Street which was released just a few years later and that I actually saw several years ago was primarily a spoof of this movie. I think I actually liked that film even more than Rififi.
Rating: 8/10