Jules Dassin: Blacklisted, Overlooked And Unsung. By Simon Thompson
Jules Dassin is a true example of a great filmmaker whose work in multiple genres goes strangely unsung.
Like his contemporary Howard Hawks, Dassin was a director who could be tasked to make a movie within any genre, yet could still find a way to put his own personal touch on it. From romances to comedies to war films, within the confines of the studio system before his blacklisting, Dassin was a director who could do it all. But if there is one particular genre of which Dassin was an indisputable master, it was film noir.
Through a run of classics beginning with Brute Force in 1947 all the way up until Rififi in 1955, Dassin, alongside the likes of Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, John Huston, and Otto Preminger helped to pioneer so many of the idiosyncratic aesthetic and narrative traits which have come to define film noir.
Due to his blacklisting, a move to Europe, and then largely working in experimental and independent film for the last half of his life Dassin’s work has become forgotten over time.
Early Life and Career
Born in 1911 to immigrant parents from Ukraine, Dassin was surrounded by the arts from an early age. The young Dassin learnt to play the piano and acted in school plays throughout his teenage years. Left wing politics were something that Dassin was introduced to very early on, when he was sent to a left-wing Jewish summer camp named Camp Kinderland, an organisation which seeks to promote various progressive political values. Dassin’s experience of attending Camp Kinderland throughout his childhood until his mid-teens would completely form the director’s world view and the tone of many of his key films.
Dassin’s route into Hollywood greatly differed from that of many of his peers (with the exception of Orson Welles) in the sense that, unlike other directors of that era who learnt their trade within the confines of the old studio system, Dassin came into Hollywood through having been a successful radio and stage play director/ sketch writer.
Dassin had spent two years in Europe studying new developments in dramatic technique which wasn’t being as widely taught in the United States, foregoing college to do so. Aged 25 he returned to America with what he had learnt, adapting Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat for CBS radio and directing a critically acclaimed yet short lived play entitled The Medicine Show. This, amongst other projects, was enough to get him recognised as a top talent by RKO who gave him a professional contract to work for them as a director in 1940.
The first six years of Dassin’s Hollywood career weren’t exactly anything to write home about. Shuffled around as a contract director by RKO, Dassin showed up, directed what he was told, and then rinsed and repeated the cycle. The highlight of Dassin’s early years in Hollywood was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s famous short story The Canterville Ghost starring Charles Laughton. It wouldn’t be until 1947, with his prison drama Brute Force, that Dassin would begin to show his true talent.
Brute Force was a gritty prison drama which, thanks to a relaxation of censorship from the Hays Code due to World War II ( and continuing in the post war period up until the mid-1950s), was made in a style and tradition which has come to be called film noir. This can be summed up as a style of crime movies from the 1940s-mid 1950s shot in atmospheric black and white and revolving around morally ambiguous characters in dangerous situations. The public appetite for these kinds of stories, given the socio-political backdrop, was at an all time high and it allowed filmmakers within something as constrictive and censorious as the American studio system to truly experiment.
Told from the point of view of Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster), an inmate at the fictional Westgate Prison whose constant escape attempts land him in conflict with the prison’s sadistic warden, Brute Force,in keeping with Dassin’s political views, took a humanistic, compassionate, yet uncompromising look at prison life, that cinema audiences at that point were not fully accustomed to.
After an early career within the confines of the studio system, Brute Force represented Dassin’s first true auteur work with its themes of sympathy for the underdog, a need for reform, and the brutal nature of institutions and the men that govern them, all being ideas that he would return to in various ways in his career.
Mid-Career Masterpieces and Blacklisting
Dassin’s first true noir (in the sense of him presenting all of the genre staples), came in the shape of The Naked City (1948). The film tells the story of two police detectives named Muldoon and Halloran (played by Barry Fitzgerald and Don Taylor) as they investigate the murder of a model. This investigation starts out as being simple enough, yet eventually drags the two detectives all around the vast New York City landscape in search of the killer.
What made The Naked City stand out from other noir films being released at the time more than anything else was its shooting style. While other key works in the classic noir era were shot on location, for example Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Dassin brought a level of documentary-like realism that hadn’t been done before in American filmmaking. This documentarian quality was achieved through Mark Hellinger’s narration, Dassin’s use of intimate camera angles and natural lighting, which, when combined with making New York a character in itself, presented the audience with a vision that was decades ahead of its time. Simply put, there is no Bullitt, Dirty Harry, or The French Connection without Dassin’s The Naked City.
Dassin’s two subsequent films Thieves’ Highway (1949)and Night And The City (1950)would each foreshadow both a key event and the resulting fallout of the said key event in Dassin’s life. Thieves’ Highway was a movie which tested the limits of Hays Code censorship to an even larger extent than The Naked City. The plot, focusing on a newly returned World War II veteran named Nick (Richard Conte) who, after finding out that his immigrant father has been badly beaten to the point of being paralysed, decides to go looking for the gangster (played by Lee J Cobb) responsible. Looking for a way into the criminal underworld, Nick eventually partners with a prostitute called Rica (Valentina Cortese) who Nick believes can help him effectively search for the perpetrator.
With a socialistic message of rooting for the underdog above anything else, Thieves’ Highway was a narrative that featured both the place of immigrants within American society and the nature of prostitution as central themes within the story. This gave Dassin’s work a Jean Renoir style quality that would ultimately make him a target.
Thieves’ Highway represented the first time that Dassin had truly expressed his political views upfront with one of his movies. As such, Thieves Highway is seen as being an example of crime cinema called Film Gris, a term coined by director Thom Andersen, meaning grey film in French, referring to a body of politically left wing in nature crime movies in which Dassin’s work played a major role.
Because the politics of Dassin’s work and the work of other filmmakers such as Nicolas Ray and Joseph Losey weren’t exactly subtle, to say the least, their films put them in the firing line of The House of Un-American Activities committee ( HUAC for short) headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Dassin first came to the attention of HUAC in 1947 during the production of The Naked City through testimony provided by James Kevin McGuinness. McGuinness claimed to HUAC that when Dassin was first hired by MGM in the earlier part of the decade he and a group of fellow filmmakers of similar political views tried to halt the production of a movie called Tennessee Johnson, a biopic about Andrew Johnson the 17th president of the United States. McGuinness testified that when he took over the executive producer role due to the death of the previous producer J Walter Ruben, he was presented with a petition by Dassin and four other screenwriters demanding production be scrapped.
Dassin, his fellow screenwriters, and others who protested Tennessee Johnson such as the NAACP, The Communist Party of the USA, Vincent Price, and Zero Mostel did so on the grounds that the film completely omitted Andrew Johnson’s well documented vicious racism. Given that the film was intended as piece of propaganda to boost the American war effort, many conservative commentators accused Dassin and others of the same opinion of trying to undermine national unity.
McGuinness’s testimony would prove to be the first blow in the carefully coordinated destruction of Dassin’s ability to work in Hollywood. From 1948-1949 Dassin’s name would be connected to multiple communist organisations, and while he was still on the verge of being blacklisted he moved to the UK temporarily to work on one of his strongest films, Night and The City.
Night and The City would prove to be another example of how forward thinking Dassin truly was. The story focuses upon a conniving American hustler named Harry Fabian (played to perfection by Richard Widmark), based in London, who treats the bombed out remains of post-war London as his own personal hunting grounds for easy targets.
Eventually Harry’s scheming, through a variety of factors, goes awry and he is forced into a corner entirely through his own hubris. Its on location shooting style, use of long takes, themes of existential despair, Carol Reed/ Orson Welles style use of shadow, as well as its anti-hero protagonist and realistic portrayal of London’s criminal underworld, combined to make Night and The City stand out from other films in the same genre in a way which critics and audiences didn’t quite appreciate at the time.
Although informally blacklisted in 1949 to the extent that he couldn’t enter studio property to edit Night and The City, Dassin’s ostracisation rapidly sped up from 1950 onwards. First he was slated to direct a film called Half Angel only to be replaced by Richard Sale, but it would be in 1951 when the director would truly find himself in hot water.
In April 1947 filmmaker Edward Dymtryk, who had been blacklisted during the first wave of HUAC hearings in 1947, decided out of self-preservation to cooperate with the HUAC and give names to the committee. Dymtryk testified that the Screen Director’s guild included seven known communists including Dassin. Just one month later, another director, Frank Tuttle, who also found himself in trouble with the HUAC, corroborated Dymtryk’s testimony implicating Dassin, and through further hearings such as the ones for actor Jose Ferrer and director Michael Gordon Dassin was outed as a member of the Communist Party of the USA.
The only work Dassin could get in the United States after 1951 was on Broadway, thanks to the kindness of Bette Davis, who bravely risked her own career to help Dassin. After the show was cut short after 90 performances due to Davis’s poor health, Dassin was offered a directing job in France which he grabbed with both hands – both for the chance at steady employment but also so he wouldn’t have to testify in front of the HUAC.
Work in Europe and later career
In 1955, after five years out of work Dassin made the movie that is widely considered his masterpiece, Rififi. An adaptation of Auguste Le Breton’s novel of the same name, Rififi is the story of an aging gangster named le Stéphanois (Jean Marais) who, after being released from prison having served a five year sentence for jewel theft, is down on his luck and struggling to re-adjust to life back out on the street. Le Stéphanois decides to team up with a group of gangsters to commit a daring robbery of a luxury jewellery shop in Paris’s Rue De La Paix, the city’s most exclusive shopping district. Made on a tiny budget, and with an unstarry cast Rififi allowed Dassin the most creative freedom he had experienced in his filmmaking career to date.
Rififi,alongside the likes of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Jean Pierre Melville’s Bob The Gambler, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing is considered by the majority of film critics and historians as being one of the key building blocks in the creation of the heist genre.
Dassin used long uninterrupted takes, most famously culminating in a half hour scene of the heist itself that contains no dialogue, music, or cuts of any kind. In keeping with a tradition he started with Night and The City Dassin shot the entirety of the film in the winter streets of Paris, which steeps the visuals in a unique moody atmosphere that many other heist films, such as Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, have tried to recapture in some ways.
Riiffi alsorepresented the first time in Dassin’s career where he had experienced unanimous critical acclaim. Nominated for a best director award at the Cannes film festival, and receiving praise from none other than future filmmaking legend Francois Truffaut, who heralded Dassin by saying that “out of the worst crime novel I’ve ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I’ve ever seen.”
Dassin’s post Rififi work represented a culmination of everything that he wanted to be in America but couldn’t. Working in France, and eventually Greece due to his marriage to actress Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s later career represents an era of bold experimentation that simply wouldn’t have been available to him in Hollywood. European critics and audiences appreciated his vision far more than their American counterparts did.
As the new-wave of Cinema gained momentum Dassin, despite being much older than leading lights of new wave cinema such as Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer, like his contemporary Federico Fellini, found himself aligned with European new wave filmmaking rather than being left behind by it. Dassin’s boundary-pushing romantic comedy Never On Sunday and his spiritual successor to RififititledTopkapi, showed that the director hadn’t been shipwrecked by the sweeping tidal wave that was leaving even the likes of Alfred Hitchcock all at sea.
Despite receiving far more praise in the second half of his career than the first, Dassin is not a household name of a great filmmaker in the manner of a Stanley Kubrick or an Orson Welles or a Billy Wilder. Dassin is far better known in Europe, than in his home country of the United States because following his blacklisting for the last half of his career, he took a far more experimental route, eschewing big studio work for the most part to make more stridently political smaller films which wouldn’t be widely distributed. Like Jean Pierre Melville before him, he’s somebody whose pioneering accomplishments have become so widespread that audiences have lost sight of the original source of them.
Through the quality film preservation available today, Dassin is a filmmaker that isn’t going to go as continually unheralded for long. The vast majority of his work is a part of The Criterion Collection and through inspiring countless people including directors such as Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, and Brian De Palma even if many people don’t know his name his fingerprints are scattered all over film history both in the USA and Europe.
