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DVD Tuesday: Best Heist Movie Ever? Rififi!
Rififi courtesy Criterion
DVD Tuesday: Steal this movie -- Rififi is the crème de la crème of heist pictures!
Australian director Roger Donaldson's '70s-era heist picture The Bank Job opens this Friday, and not only is it a taut, engrossing thriller, but it proves that Jason Statham actually can act. He's not Laurence Olivier or anything, but his performance justifies my longtime (and much derided) feeling that, given the chance, he could do more than crack wise and flex his formidable musculature.
Naturally, I got to thinking about great heist movies, which inevitably led me to Jules Dassin's unforgettable Rififi (1954).
Rififi wasn't the first true heist picture, which I'd define as a film that is focused on the planning, execution and aftermath of a complicated and difficult robbery as well as on the complex relationships between the robbers. The first was probably John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). But Rififi was revelation when I saw it for the first time a few years back at New York's Film Forum — it lived up to its reputation and then some.
The film's weary anti-hero is Tony (Jean Servais), fresh off a robbery rap he took so his young protégé, Jo (Carl Mohner), could remain on the outside with his wife and small son.
His health ruined, his underworld reputation in tatters, and his girlfriend shacked up with a Montmartre club owner who moonlights as a police snitch, Tony reluctantly agrees to join Jo, Italian pimp Mario (Robert Manuel) and safecracker Cesar (Dassin, hiding behind the pseudonym Perlo Vita, from the Italian phrase "per la vita" — "struggle for life"), in robbing a fashionable jewelry store on the Rue de la Paix.
The planning and the aftermath are gripping, but the robbery is a tour de force: 28 minutes of near silence — not a word, not a music cue. The gang gets into the apartment above the store, cuts through the shop's ceiling and tackles the safe, using such mundane objects as an umbrella and a fire extinguisher to game the security system. The sequence is so tense that the slightest sound makes you jump like a nervous cat. And don't imagine it's not tough because it was made more than 50 years ago: It's lousy with junkies, sociopathic killers, child kidnappers and woman beaters.
Director Jules Dassin, the child of impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem, and dabbled briefly in acting: His credits ranged from Yiddish-theater walk-ons to a featured role in Oscar Saul and Lou Lantz's notorious Federal Theater Project Children's Theater parable Revolt of the Beavers, which one dismayed critic dubbed "Mother Goose Marxism."
Dassin made his first film, an acclaimed 20-minute version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, in 1941 and directed a remarkable string of noir classics — Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves' Highway (1949) — before falling victim to McCarthy-era blacklisting, which sent him scrambling for work in Europe. After making Night and the City (1950) in London, he went to France for Rififi. Future director François Truffaut, then a critic for the influential Cahiers du Cinema, called it the best noir film he'd ever seen.
I don't know that I can sell Rififi any harder without setting up impossible expectations, so I'll stop now. But if you don't trust me, trust Al Pacino: He's attached to a remake tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release.
Things to Consider:
Does the appeal of heist films lie in the personalities of the thieves, or the how-to minutiae of beating the system by robbing a supposedly impregnable bank/vault/gallery/ whatever?
Why do we like charming rogues — what makes us root for guys doing something that most of us would agree is just plain wrong?
Are there any heist movies you like in which you don't much care for the conspirators? For me, the prime example is Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956): The cast is brilliant, the screenplay (which Kubrick cowrote with pulp genius Jim Thompson) is brilliant, the sheer poetry of the darker-than-dark ending kills me, but the plan hinges on shooting a horse mid-race. I can't get with those guys.
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Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Michael Clayton
Network
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Shoot 'Em Up
Freeway
A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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Mar 4, 2008 12:21 PM
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I completely agree with you on the subject of The Bank Job. It's a terrific little film - helped out tremendously by being set in the '70s, when the technology available wasn't really going to upstage the cast.
I further agree with you about Jason Statham. The man can act - and he's the closest thing we have to a genuine action star at the moment.
For me, heist flicks are interesting because they always feature meticulaous planning by a [usually] odd assortment of would-be villains [amateur or professional] - and because, once we get to know the characters, we can relate when the inevitable X-Factor appears and screws things up.
It's the accidents that screw up the meticulous plans that are the big draw for me. Then we get to see how the characters improvise to get around [or over, or under - or even through] the obstacles that have appeared before them.
What makes a heist film so difficult to pull off is not the ingenuity of the original plan, or even the actual obstacles that crops up. What makes them so difficult is that you usually have a team of heisters [is that even a word?] that must be developed well enough in half a film to make us give a damn about how they handle the inevitable obstacles.
Then, on top of that, we have to believe them capable of the improvizations that follow the arrival of the obstacle.
If you don't believe the characters, then it becomes a technical exercise - which can be fun on some level, but not very engaging emotionally.
Rififi is the classic example of the successful heist film, but films like The Italian Job [both versions work about equally as well] and The Bank Job also work because of that simple rule.
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Mar 4, 2008 3:24 PM
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Haven't seen this one, but you'd better believe that this is going to the top of my queue! See, this is what I love about Ask FlickChick, you find out about awesome Heist movies from 1954!
I completely agree with you about Jason Statham, I think he's a really charming and charismatic guy, and I like almost everything he does. Snatch was a pretty terrible movie that was rescued by a few very good (and funny) performances, mainly Statham, Brad Pitt, Dennis Farina and Alan Ford.
Obviously, I love Heist movies, but I guess that's like saying that you like candy. I mean, they're awesome! One of my personal favorites is the above mentioned Asphalt Jungle, which pretty much invents all the conventions for the entire genre. I also have a soft-spot for the Mamet-film called Heist. The plot is all over the place, but Mamet delivers the dialog, Gene Hackman is fantastic and the heist itself is spectacular, probably the best one ever.
I tend to favor the heists which actually does have a tenuous grip on reality. Frequently, they veer of into ridiculousness, like in the Ocean movies or in Entrapment. I much prefer heists like in 3000 Miles to Graceland (a totally underrated movie! it does the guilty-pleasure-action-flick thing fantastically!) that at least aspire to be possible. Another movie that did that very well was Inside Man (although it had other problems), it was an insane plan, but you did actually believe that it was possible.
Best one of all time? I don't know, that's a tough one. I'd probably say Jackie Brown (which is essentially a Heist film).
For me, the strongest appeal of the heist film is the "how would I do it?"-factor. I always think something like this when they have the obligatory briefing:
Dude in the movie
They have two cameras here, and security guards here, here and here.
Me, being a smartypants
Well, obviously, you'd just get into the central security camera databank on the third floor, install a tap, record a couple of minutes, and then loop it, Speed-style. Then you plant an explosive in the car outside, blow it up, thus distracting the guards. If there's anyone left, you either shoot them with your silenced gun (homemade silencer, so it's untracable, obviously), or you'd knock him out with a blackjack. Average response time for the cops would be about three to five minutes, plus an additional ten before they find the knocked out guards and realize that they're being robbed, which is plenty of time to get into the vault and then flee through the sewers.
Does anyone else do this? I do it ALL the time, which people find mildly annoying. That's the risk you run when you watch a movie with me 
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Mar 4, 2008 5:28 PM
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I do it ALL the time, which people find mildly annoying. That's the risk you run when you watch a movie with me
I'd kill you if I had to sit through a movie while listening to your "how I would do it" talking. How could you do this to others?
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Mar 4, 2008 6:27 PM
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Ranger99: I don't do it ALL the time... You might hear me pipe up in the middle of the film pointing out a plot-hole or two ("Oh, come on, are you telling that they were able to crack a 128-bit AES cipher with a laptop? Come on, people!"), I don't incessantly blather on. And besides, all my friends do this too, many of us come from an engineering background and it comes natural. It's like a game!
I mostly play out those kind of scenarios inside my head, as I said, that's one of the things I love about heist films, you get to be a your own little super-thief without leaving your couch
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Mar 4, 2008 6:40 PM
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Yes - I too have an engineering background and I silently do break down many plotholes. I just prefer to watch a show then comment. I will ocassionally pause a show to make a comment.
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Mar 5, 2008 12:49 PM
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Interesting that your post was about heist movies because I watched The Score (my favorite) last night. I loved the interplay among Brando, Pacino, and Norton. Seeing such talent on the screen was a real pleasure.
I think that the appeal of heist movies and their charming rogues is that they allow our id to run free and experience the excitement without facing any of the consequences, e.g. jail or heartbreak.
As for heist movies with unlikeable characters, I will admit that Julia Robert's character in Ocean's 12 bugged the daylights out of me. That entire subplot about the character resembling the famous celebrity Julia Roberst was nothing more than one long, boring ego stroke. Sad because I really wanted to like the movie.
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Mar 5, 2008 2:25 PM
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