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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 04/10/2008 : 17:31:19
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Brilliant film-maker - whatever you think of his politics.
My M* colleague pays tribute here.
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A visionary life
(Tuesday 08 April 2008)
PASSION: Jules Dassin with his future wife Melina Mercouri in 1960.
JEFF SAWTELL looks back at the life of Jules Dassin, the legendary communist film-maker.
JULES DASSIN, the US film-maker, has died in Athens aged 96, leaving a legacy that promoted a new realism in Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) before he was branded a communist.
As a result of this, Dassin was largely unknown in his own land. He didn't return until 1968, when he directed Up Tight, a drama set in the black ghetto of Cleveland and based on Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer.
His status as an un-American also meant his non-inclusion on university syllabuses, a fact that I learnt from a young UCLA graduate in 2001 who had never heard of, never mind seen, Rififi (1955).
That student is a tutor now and tells me that one of the first things that he did was include Rififi as a must-see film. Ironically, I was also to see the film in 2001 at a special screening in Detroit.
Dassin was named as a communist by Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle during the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1949 and was blacklisted immediately.
He never repudiated his communist politics and pursued his career abroad.
North America's loss was our gain. He arrived here in 1950 to make Night and the City, with Richard Widmark playing a small-time hustler who dies in his pursuit of the mythical main chance.
Now considered a landmark in the development of film noir, it was shot against a background of a London smog, heightening the sensation that Widmark's character was trapped within his culture.
You might imagine that Dassin had a sympathy for the little man who couldn't escape his supposed fate.
You'd be right, but Dassin would emphasise that we are capable of changing circumstances.
His style was to take the camera onto the streets, a location technique that allowed him to create a form of realism that smashed the idea of everything being shot on a Hollywood backlot.
Rififinished.
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RIP Jules Dassin
