"Jules Dassin again. One of those movies that I wish I was around then and could have been in . . . if I could speak French!"

"Richard Widmark’s finest moment. Jules Dassin’s too. Following the ten-cent dreams of a five-cent loser to become a wrestling promoter in the seedy London underworld, Widmark and Dassin locate the authentic heart of noir: working-class tragedy played out for Shakespearean stakes."

"I watched this 1947 stark, black and white, noirish prison drama as part of research for a film I directed called Animal Factory, written by novelist and ex-convict Eddie Bunker. For years I thought director Jules Dassin was a Frenchman working in the U.S. I was surprised to learn he was an American (Russian Jew) from Connecticut who fled the U.S. during the red scare of the fifties. He ended up in Paris and made the wonderful French film Rififi, which added to my confusion. The Naked City (1948) by Dassin is also a classic, shot on gloriously gritty locations in New York City."

"Jules Dassin was an American filmmaker who moved to Paris to escape Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the rest of the HUAC thugs. In the City of Lights he managed to make the most French gangster film and best heist movie ever. The actual break-in and robbery scene (based on a real burglary in Marseille at the turn of the century) happens over an astoundingly tense twenty-six minutes of silence. It is unforgettable. Dassin himself plays the role of the Italian safecracker Cesar under the pseudonym Perlo Vita and showed himself to be as adept in front of the camera as he was behind it."

"I love that Jules Dassin took an archetype like the mentor and turned him into the main character. One of the greatest heist films I’ve ever seen, Rififi employs character for the sake of plot progression, resulting in a unique economy of filmmaking. Pure entertainment. Plus, the details: padding a hammer not leaving matches or cigarette butts during a heist, catching debris with an umbrella. And that’s just one scene."

"Jules Dassin’s gangster film about a robbery and its consequences is a French classic, noir before the word was in use to describe a certain kind of filmmaking. A word is in order here: I was educated in Switzerland, in an era when French-speaking people expected to see French films, so when we were allowed to go to the local cinema at Rolle or Gstaad, we mostly saw French films. British films, except for The Third Man, which is very “European” in tone, seldom played; still less big Hollywood ones. Rififi was a stunner, and an eye-opener, teaching us that French gangsters were a lot more interesting and attractive than our own mobsters, but just as tough, if not tougher. “Julie” Dassin was an American who moved to France, but he captured a whole, pungent slice of French life, and for months everyone at my school (le Rosey) went around trying to sound like Jean Servais, and to talk with a cigarette glued to their lips. Whole scenes from it still play in my fantasies."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."