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muckefuckYesterday's feature presentation was Rififi. As I suspected, it's suffered a bit from decades of imitation. One of the blurbs from the trailer called the suspense during the half-hour heist sequence "almost unbearable". Believe me, it's quite bearable--to the point of near boredom, some might say. For me, the tension only really ratchets up when the whole thing begins to unravel.
For me, the history of the picture was as interesting as the story on screen, if not moreso. For instance, I was tickled to find that the surname of the author of the original novel, Le Breton, is a nickname of the sort carried by several of the protagonists. But whereas Le Breton was actually born in Brittany, the actor playing "le Suédois" is Austrian, "le Stéphanois" is from Belgium rather than the south of France, and--to top it all--Césare "le Milanais" is played by the director himself, who despite bearing the uber-Gallic name of "Jules Dassin" is a native of Connecticut.
In the accompanying interview, Dassin tells an anecdote about how Le Breton pulled a gun on him when asking him of the screenplay "Where is my book?" Apparently the source material is considerably more lurid and Dassin focused on the heist in order to cut a lot of it out. What's interesting to me is that despite this, he keeps in an amount of violence toward women that is shocking to modern sensibilities. Early on, a woman is beaten with a leather strap--by the protagonist. Sure, he's an anti-hero, but how many directors today would bank on the audience summoning up the least sympathy for a character like that today?
It's amazing how good the cinematography is given the small budget. There's a panorama of crumbling low-rise buildings in what looks like Montmartre that I'd love to have framed. Amusingly, I recognised a locale from the slide cataloging project we just finished up. There was an image of a barricade on the Rue Castiglione during the Siege of Paris with a view looking north to the Place Vendôme; the jeweler's they rob in the film is located north of the plaza on the Rue de la Paix in what even today is a high-end shopping street.
Dassin stated that the argot in the novel was so impenetrable he had to ask the producer to come over and read the book to him. The name rififi itself is a slang alteration of rif "combat zone" from an earlier colloquialism for "fire", a word unfamiliar enough to a Francophone audience that the theme song contains an explanation of the meaning (along with more disturbing references to partner abuse). Otherwise, the slang seems to mostly of a very common sort, e.g. words like gosse and mec that they even teach in French class nowadays.
For me, the history of the picture was as interesting as the story on screen, if not moreso. For instance, I was tickled to find that the surname of the author of the original novel, Le Breton, is a nickname of the sort carried by several of the protagonists. But whereas Le Breton was actually born in Brittany, the actor playing "le Suédois" is Austrian, "le Stéphanois" is from Belgium rather than the south of France, and--to top it all--Césare "le Milanais" is played by the director himself, who despite bearing the uber-Gallic name of "Jules Dassin" is a native of Connecticut.
In the accompanying interview, Dassin tells an anecdote about how Le Breton pulled a gun on him when asking him of the screenplay "Where is my book?" Apparently the source material is considerably more lurid and Dassin focused on the heist in order to cut a lot of it out. What's interesting to me is that despite this, he keeps in an amount of violence toward women that is shocking to modern sensibilities. Early on, a woman is beaten with a leather strap--by the protagonist. Sure, he's an anti-hero, but how many directors today would bank on the audience summoning up the least sympathy for a character like that today?
It's amazing how good the cinematography is given the small budget. There's a panorama of crumbling low-rise buildings in what looks like Montmartre that I'd love to have framed. Amusingly, I recognised a locale from the slide cataloging project we just finished up. There was an image of a barricade on the Rue Castiglione during the Siege of Paris with a view looking north to the Place Vendôme; the jeweler's they rob in the film is located north of the plaza on the Rue de la Paix in what even today is a high-end shopping street.
Dassin stated that the argot in the novel was so impenetrable he had to ask the producer to come over and read the book to him. The name rififi itself is a slang alteration of rif "combat zone" from an earlier colloquialism for "fire", a word unfamiliar enough to a Francophone audience that the theme song contains an explanation of the meaning (along with more disturbing references to partner abuse). Otherwise, the slang seems to mostly of a very common sort, e.g. words like gosse and mec that they even teach in French class nowadays.