"Every aspect of the movie is excellent. There isn’t one wrong move — from the script, to the acting, to the music. It’s such a beautiful human story about an individual struggle set against the corrupt unions screwing over the dock workers. So, you have this social background for the situation, and then you have the personal human journey of the brother of one of these union mobsters, who has to sort of turn on his own people. Marlon Brando pretty much rocked the cinema with this new style of acting, and you can never go back to Cary Grant. As wonderful as Cary Grant is, Marlon Brando changed the game. Karl Malden has one of the greatest movie monologues of all time as the priest in the docks, encouraging everyone to take a stand. He was like the first Norma Rae. I have the soundtrack on my iPod. I love great movie soundtracks, and I consider that one of those."

"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."