Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Cast: Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb, Millard Mitchell, Jack Oakie, Barbara Lawrence, Joseph Pevney, Morris Carnovsky, Tamara Shane, Kasia Orzazewski, Norbert Schiller, Hope Emerson. Screenplay: A.J. Bezzerides, based on his novel. Cinematography: Norbert Brodine. Art direction: Chester Gore, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway is a fascinating, little-known noir, set in multiethnic working-class postwar California. Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, who returns to Fresno after the war to find his father (Morris Carnovsky) has lost his legs in a trucking accident after being cheated by Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a boss in the produce trade in San Francisco. Determined to take revenge on Figlia, Nick takes up with Ed Kinney (Millard Mitchell), who has salvaged Nick's father's truck and wants to buy up a farmer's apple crop and resell it in the city. There are some exciting scenes on the road, as trucks roar by on the narrow highway after Nick's truck blows a tire and he gets pinned under the truck trying to change it. Rescued by Ed, who is following in the salvaged truck which is held together, as Ed says, by spit. a sleep-deprived Nick makes it to Frisco (don't cavil, that's what it's called). There he encounters Figlia, who does what he can to cheat Nick, including hiring a streetwalker (Valentina Cortese) to seduce him. The film gets a great sense of actuality from the scenes set in the old San Francisco produce market, and the performances have a satisfying grittiness to them. Dassin and Bezzerides are forced into some narrative compromises by Hollywood studio conventions and censorship, but at its best, Thieves' Highway often evokes Italian neorealism in its depiction of ordinary people caught up in anything-goes capitalism.    

The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948)

Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Don Taylor, Dorothy Hart, Frank Conroy, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent, Adelaide Klein, Grover Burgess, Tom Pedi, Enid Markey, voice of Mark Hellinger. Screenplay: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: John DeCuir. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner.

This hugely influential police procedural won two Oscars, for William H. Daniels's cinematography and Paul Weatherwax's film editing. Which is as it should be: What excitement and interest the film has today, after years of derivative movies and TV shows, is in the documentation of New York City streets and landmarks in the years just after World War II and in the brilliantly paced chase scene that comes at the climax, when the murderer scales the Williamsburg Bridge to evade the cops pursuing him. The script now feels clichéd, even if some of the clichés were new, and the dialogue sometimes banal and over-expository. Nor does producer Mark Hellinger's occasionally pretentious voice-over narration sound right to the ear. Barry Fitzgerald overindulges his leprechaun schtick as Lt. Muldoon and Don Taylor is a bit too determinedly callow as Halloran. On the other hand, the supporting cast is convincingly real. It's fun to watch today for some faces that became familiar later, many of them performing on Broadway at the time the film was made and rounded up for bit parts. Look for Paul Ford, Kathleen Freeman, James Gregory, John Marley, Arthur O'Connell, David Opatoshu, Nehemiah Persoff, Molly Picon, and John Randolph among them. The director, Jules Dassin, and the screenwriters, Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, were among those who fell afoul of the witch hunters of the blacklist in the 1950s.

Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)

It's fun sometimes to go back and read the reviews Bosley Crowther wrote for the New York Times, panning films that are now regarded as classics. Crowther, if you've forgotten, was the lead film critic for the Times for 27 years, until he panned Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and persisted in attacking the film in follow-up articles until the Times nudged him into retirement. My generation grew up thinking of Crowther as the classic fuddy-duddy. Some of the harsh moralizing that marked his Bonnie and Clyde diatribe was present throughout his career, as in, for example, his comments in his review of Jules Dassin's Night and the City, which he called "a pointless, trashy yarn," a "a turgid pictorial grotesque," "a melange of maggoty episodes," and a "cruel, repulsive picture of human brutishness." It almost makes you want to run right out and see it, doesn't it? But there's a part of me that thinks the old foof was onto something: Night and the City is just a little too dark to be credible, and some elements of it -- such as Richard Widmark's over-the-top performance and the expressionistic camera angles of cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum (billed as Max Greene) -- verge on film noir self-parody. Still, there's a great energy in Night and the City, which often reminds me of Dickens's forays into the underworld -- the titular city is London -- especially when it comes to character names. The chief villain (Francis L. Sullivan, imitating Sydney Greenstreet) is a Mr. Nosseross -- his given name is Philip, not Rye -- and there's a minor character with the über-Dickensian name of Fergus Chilk. Widmark plays Harry Fabian, whose life is a continuous hustle, trying to gather enough money to finance his various get-rich-quick schemes. His long-suffering girlfriend, Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney, in a smaller role than her billing suggests), is a singer in a clip joint run by the Nosserosses -- Philip and his wife, Helen (Googie Withers). Eventually, Harry overreaches by trying to loosen the hold on the pro wrestling exhibition racket in London held by Kristo (Herbert Lom), whose star wrestler is known as the Strangler (Mike Mazurki). Harry cons an honest old Greek wrestler named Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko) into staging a bout between Gregorius's protégé, Nikolas of Athens (Ken Richmond) and the Strangler, but everything goes to hell when Nosseross withdraws his promised financial support. There is a great wrestling scene in which Gregorius himself takes on the Strangler, who has broken Nikolas's wrist. Gregorius wins, but dies of a heart attack afterward, one of the many deaths the movie accumulates. The film makes great atmospheric use of its London setting, which was necessitated because Dassin was about to be blacklisted in Hollywood -- it's to the credit of 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck that he warned Dassin of this and, when Dassin decided he would seek work in Europe, allowed him to make the film in London.

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947)

Surprisingly violent for a film made under the Production Code, Brute Force gives us a prison-break story in which we root for the prisoners, but it still comes down heavily on the crime-does-not-pay moral: "Nobody escapes," says one of the movie's few survivors to the camera at the end. "Nobody ever really escapes." Under Jules Dassin's direction, Richard Brooks's screenplay tries to have it both ways: The cons are heroic and the guards are villainous, but law and order must prevail. The easy way out of this is to kill off both the heroes and the villains. The chief hero is Joe Collins, played by Burt Lancaster with his usual handsomely bullish intensity. The chief villain is the head guard, Capt. Munsey, played against type by Hume Cronyn. The imbalance between the two is exhibited early in the film when Munsey tries to dress down Collins but is confronted with a massive Lancastrian cold shoulder. But Munsey has guile on his side, along with ambition to supplant the weakling Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen), who is under political pressure to toughen up enforcement in the prison, from which reports of unrest among the inmates have been emerging. Dassin tells us all we need to know about Munsey when we see him in his office, which has little homoerotic touches in its decor like a picture of a male torso, along with a large Hitlerian photograph of Munsey himself. While beating a prisoner with a rubber hose to elicit information about a planned prison break, Munsey turns up the volume on the Wagner he is playing on the phonograph. Not that the cons are any less gentle: To punish a prisoner who collaborated with the guards, they force him into the machine that stamps out license plates, and during the climactic prison break, a stoolie is strapped to the front of a mine car and shoved out into the gunfire from the guards. The film never really lightens things up, though there are some flashback scenes involving tender moments between some of the prisoners and what the credits bill as "the women on the 'outside,'" including Ann Blyth as Collins's cancer-stricken wife. There are some good performances from Charles Bickford as the con who edits the prison newspaper and joins the escape plan after he learns that his expected parole has been put on indefinite hold, and Art Smith as the prison's cynical, alcoholic doctor, along with solid support from Sam Levene, Jeff Corey, Howard Duff, and a horde of well-chosen ugly-mug extras.

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

The success of Rififi had a lasting effect on the "caper" or "heist" genre, which is still with us in one form or another, including the Mission: Impossible movies. Dassin's 30-minute sequence depicting the break-in and safe-cracking was hailed as a tour de force. I can't help wondering if Robert Bresson saw Rififi before he made his great 1956 film A Man Escaped, which takes a similar wordless and music-free approach to showing the preparations for Fontaine's prison break. Other than that, of course, nothing could be further from Fontaine's noble efforts to find freedom than the larcenous thuggery of Dassin's jewel thieves. Dassin knows, of course, that audiences respond positively to cleverness and skill, which is virtually all that his quartet of thieves have going for them. Tony (Jean Servais) is a brutal ex-con who beats his former mistress (Marie Sabouret) with a belt; Jo (Carl Möhner) is a swaggering, handsome guy for whom Tony took the rap for an earlier heist because Jo has a wife and child; Mario (Robert Manuel) is an easy-going ne'er-do-well; and César (Dassin under the pseudonym Perlo Vita) is a professional safe-cracker. Dassin manipulates us into thinking of these guys as heroes, if only because the gang led by Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who wants to muscle in on their ill-gotten gains, is even worse. In the end, both sides are wiped out, but not before Jo's little boy (Dominique Maurin) is kidnapped and held for ransom. The final sequence of the film is particularly harrowing, especially to contemporary viewers used to mandated seatbelts and conscientious childproofing: A dying Tony drives the 5-year-old boy across Paris in an open convertible as the delighted kid stands on and even clambers over the seats of the speeding car. For all its unpleasantness, Rififi is as memorable as it was influential. It led to countless imitations, usually more light-hearted, including Dassin's own Topkapi (1964). It also revived Dassin's career, which had been at a standstill after he was blacklisted in Hollywood; Rififi's international success was a defiant nose-thumbing directed at HUAC's witch hunts.