There is a scene in this film towards the end where the son of a criminal accidentally loses his grip on his helium balloon. As it gets away from the little boy and floats up into the sky, director Jules Dassin switches to the perspective of a father and his kid sitting at the back of the bus looking out the window at what just happened. The father takes a moment to lecture his own son on the consequences of carelessness.

This single moment, a seemingly unnecessary insert into the rest of the plot, illustrates both Dassin's artistic predilection for visual lyricism and his capacity for narrative poetry. The shot provides a perspective outside of the main story that comments…

I feel like I can empathize with the real-life criminals who tried to execute actual heists after they watched Rififi, because I once tried to execute an actual front flip off my parents’ roof onto a stack of mattresses after watching Jackass 3D. It didn’t go so well for me, either.

The quintessential heist film (Ocean’s Eleven don’t want that smoke) and one of the best noirs of all time. Feels akin to The Asphalt Jungle, but with more emphasis placed on the criminals combatting their own inclinations rather than just being cornered by the police. Of course, the 30ish minute silent heist sequence itself is also a staple of cinema, and one for which American director Jules Dassin (who…

I give kudos to any film that can pull off a substantial amount of time without dialogue: WALL-E, There Will Be Blood, 3-Iron, but Rififi takes the cake. A full half-hour with no dialogue and no music, and it is one of the most suspenseful scenes I've ever seen.

When people say Rififi is the best bank heist film, they mean it. Everything about this film is perfect. Jean Servais, a famous French actor who had not worked in years is perfect as Tony le Stéphanois, a strong quiet man who just got out of jail and is lured into another heist. He's highly respected among his peers because of his loyalty, his wits, his attention to detail, but more…

After spending 5-years in exile from filmmaking blacklisted in Hollywood for his communist party membership by professional colleagues he previously viewed as friends, legendary American noir filmmaker Jules Dassin found himself on the gritty, cold and grey overcast streets of Paris on a shoe-string budget shooting what would become one of the most influential heist-noirs of all time (for which
he would win Best Director at Cannes and be mistakenly thought of as a French crime filmmaker for a good portion of his life); a film curiously about a sick, poor, aging professional thief returning to his craft after serving a 5-year stretch in prison for taking the rap for a friend and reexperiencing first-hand the excitement and camaraderie of…

"Five years in the pen marks a man."

Bullets don't kill people, long prison sentences do.

It's entirely impossible to talk about Rififi without reckoning with its central heist scene. Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais) is a career criminal recently released from his commuted jail term (for good behavior), and his friends on the outside convince him to participate in (and essentially engineer) a bank robbery. What follows is without doubt the single greatest heist scene in any movie I've ever seen. It clocks in at about half an hour long, and it plays out completely without dialogue. Following the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, "visual storytelling" has become a popular buzzword, but there's nothing that better describes the…

64/100

Incredibly grim, and yet...superficially grim, somehow? Dassin's efforts to sidestep the source novel's racism, while admirable, appear to have neutered its tragic element; there's virtually no hint of the inexorability that packs such a wallop in Kubrick's The Killing (released just a year later). Consequently, Rififi peaks during its celebrated wordless heist sequence, which is gratifyingly procedural at a time when that sort of prolonged attention to minute detail was extremely rare. Also, Servais and Dassin outclass the other two actors by an order of magnitude. Absorbing, even "fun" in its bleak way, but not a film that lingers much; Night and the City and Thieves' Highway make a stronger case for Dassin as one of the key noir…

Rififi might be another entry in the gangster/heist genre, but it's certainly the one that consolidated it — elevating robbery to a level of artful craftsmanship and portraying thieves not as honorable human beings, but as individuals bound by a tacit code of honor that fascinated viewers who remained on the safer side of the law. The film established the archetypes that would shape the plots of future caper classics. Just one year later, Kubrick released The Killing, adding a layer of originality through clever editing and precise timing.

Even with my expectations already set — knowing it was a story about the perfect crime ruined by the human factor, and adapted from a novel by Auguste Le Breton —…