On March 31, 2008 the world lost writer-director-producer Jules Dassin, who claimed one of the most unusual careers in post-war cinema. Certainly no one (least of all Dassin himself) could have predicted the odd and seemingly capricious path that the occupational trajectory of this American-born, European-honed director would take. From his early work at the WPA Federal Theater Project in the 1930s through his towering successes with Brute Force, Rififi, Never On Sunday and Topkapi during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, up through his dispiriting and pedestrian swan song (the now-forgotten Canadian romance Circle of Two (1980)), it was the most bittersweet of journeys.

It would be easy to dismiss the career of Dassin – as have many – given the vacillating quality of his cinematic output and the lack of any obvious recurrent personal stamp. He was a journeyman craftsperson at heart, however, and as such, considerably adroit. This is the context in which his work begins to take on meaning and definition; to try to extend him beyond the confines of that framework represents a distortion. As one watches Rififi, for example (Dassin’s best-known and most popular outing) one feels repeatedly struck by the skill of the narrative construction and the documentary-like heist observation; one feels that one is witnessing the work of a master watchmaker who has fit every gear snugly and securely into place, and one can feel Dassin turning those gears. The same can be said for the director’s early MGM short The Tell-Tale Heart. To be certain, there are distinct pleasures and excitements to be had from this workmanlike approach to cinema. Yet it proved extremely vulnerable to to the circumstances in which his films were made.

As a result, if the director took on routine programmer assignments from MGM or Universal, the work invariably emerged as mediocre. Yet the other extreme also proved ineffectual: after he set up his own banner, Melinafilm, with wife Melina Mercouri, Dassin seemed almost too free to pursue his own proclivities and to lapse into self-indulgent pretension and political obscurity. The most impressive Dassin films were those that took a middle ground - the ones that offered him an opportunity to work with creative and incisive producers, in America and Europe, who set forth general guidelines but nonetheless gave the director some creative room to breathe and an opportunity to flex his filmmaking muscles. Rififi epitomizes this notion, as does The Tell-Tale Heart - the latter made within the confines of MGM but reportedly subject to precious little studio control.

The career of Dassin, as a whole, also seemed guided to an almost absurd degree by the wiles of fate, circumstance, and the era at hand. Seldom has a director existed whose career has taken so many odd or unpredictable turns, tied inextricably to the period in question - and tied to a director’s eccentric impulses. Consider, for example, the way in which he began his professional ascent, prompted by a bizarre, spur-of-the-moment instinct. He developed a taste for theater while touring Europe, from a most unlikely source: a Yiddish version of King Lear performed on stage by a Muscovite dwarf (!). That inspired this Jewish-born native of Middletown, Connecticut to end a lengthy period of European sojourning, return to the Big Apple and learn the entire Yiddish language in a remarkably short time, simply to provide himself with entrée into the then-prevalent Yiddish theatrical troupes that filled the off-Broadway stages of Manhattan. The plan worked, and (thanks to the climate of the day) Dassin found it virtually impossible to separate art from politics for the next several years – witness his enlistment in the socialist ensemble Artef Players, his involvement as a lead actor in the family-oriented, Marxist musical comedy Revolt of the Beavers, in 1937, and his tentative membership in the Communist Party – an association that formally ended two years later. That enlistment would cast a pall over the director’s flexibility and mobility for a lengthy period of time, but with a delayed effect, of course; back in late 1930s America, Socialism and Communism were not merely accepted but encouraged. The country - and Dassin’s career - would witness an act change with the arrival of McCarthy.

If raw talent ushered Dassin into a position writing radio plays for diva Kate Smith, and then magnetized representatives of RKO studios (who hired the fledgling as a directorial apprentice to such giants as Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin), no one has quite explained or accounted for what prompted RKO to fire him, or what kick-started the rumor at MGM that Dassin was studio-head Louis B. Mayer’s nephew. Taking this as a cue, Dassin did nothing to dispel the myth and (correctly perceiving it as a ladder up) in fact accepted a related offer to helm three shorts: a documentary piece about the artist Pablo Casals, a documentary piece about concert pianist Artur Rubinstein, and the aforementioned adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, which swept up a plethora of awards and virtually made Dassin’s reputation as a director via sheer directorial bravura and visual invention.

The next several years reflected on the mediocrity of routine studio moviemaking, as Dassin trekked from one MGM-backed journeyman project to another – from the fantasy of The Canterville Ghost to the whimsy of A Letter for Evie; only when Dassin rebelled by hearkening over to Universal and pooling his talents with those of visionary producer Mark Hellinger did masterpieces begin to emerge – the prison drama Brute Force (scripted by a young Richard Brooks) and the neorealist-influenced noir Naked City. Hellinger’s death during the production of City – combined with Dassin’s recurrent struggles to equal the high-points of that work for some time afterward – suggested that he worked best in collaborative relationships with others who could equal his talent and vision. Hence the creation the still-influential noir Night and the City (1950) – a thriller that sports Richard Widmark’s most iconic performance as loser grifter Harry Fabian.*

Dassin’s life, of course, turned a dark and ugly corner given the crippling interference of HUAC in his career during the mid-1950s (thanks to Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle), and thereafter, he could understandably never quite shake his preference for Europe – a feeling shared by Joseph Losey and others who survived the same indignities. All told, Dassin did encounter mixed success on the European continent, but comparatively greater freedom at the hands of enterprising producers, there, who both gave the director room to move and inspired him creatively. Dassin’s masterpiece, the 1955 Rififi (produced by Rene G. Vuattoux and adapted from a novel by Auguste le Breton) came about in exactly this manner and its influence cannot be overstated; the progenitor of the entire heist movie subgenre, it inspired thousands of lesser imitators for decades to come. Its now familiar story tells of a group of jewel thieves who embark upon an ingenious robbery and then watch the residual effects gradually cause everything to unravel. Dassin also gave himself a supporting role in that production, adopting the pseudonym Perlo Vita.

An immediate follow-up, the intriguing but long-forgotten political drama He Who Must Die, seemed almost entirely borne out of Dassin’s off and on-camera relationship with the luminous Mercouri, whom he promptly married. An adaptation of a novel by Last Temptation of Christ scribe Nikos Kazantzakis, filmed on the island of Crete, it weaves the tale of Turkish oppression of a 1920s Greek village, with a narrative that bears distinct and unmissable parallels to the Passion Play in Catholicism. Critics responded favorably to it, as they did to a follow-up, the romantic comedy smash Never on Sunday. In that low-budget outing, Dassin essayes a lead as Homer Thrace, an American drawn to Greece, where he unwisely attempts to play Svengali to a nubile prostitute (Mercouri). Audiences flocked to it and turned it into one of the seminal hits of that year; it earned favorable critical notices as well.

Unfortunately, at this point, when it seemed that Dassin’s fortunes could not possibly improve, such is exactly what happened: despite the 1964 international success of Topkapi - an all-star satirical variant on Rififi about a motley bunch of jewel thieves who attempt to lift a treasure from a palace in Istanbul, which evinced a deft directorial hand – the director quickly sank into a series of pretentious, shallow and empty disappointments (often accompanied by his muse Mercouri), that are almost unworthy of mention. These included the unconvincing Greco-tragic contemporization Phaedra (1963), the shallow melodrama 10:30pm Summer (1966, adapted from a Marguerite Duras novel); and Uptight (1968), an urban drama (sans Mercouri) about African American liberation. One bright and shining exception occurred in 1970, when Dassin and Mercouri teamed up for a gentle drama entitled Promesse de l’aube – an adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel of the same name. In later years, Dassin’s onscreen interests seemed in constant danger of being completely devoured by his self-indulgent political fixations, a tendency that led him blindly into “niche” territory and opened him up to the grave danger of time-sensitive cinematic material on more than a few occasions. Certainly, the string of disappointments that he issued between 1971-1980 (which ended, as indicated, with Circle of Two - a treacly and cliched May-December romance starring Richard Burton and Tatum O’Neal) more than accounts for the 30 years of cinematic inactivity that followed.

In retrospect, Dassin’s career seems more of a reflection on both the pitfalls and potential triumphs of moviemaking as a collective activity, than it does as an indicator of the director’s talent (or lack thereof). When given material with widespread appeal, and the room to flex his creative muscles, he generally proved himself a competent, dedicated and capable craftsperson. On the other hand, when he fell into the gears of a large studio system intent on forcing him to crank out vehicles and routine genre pieces (as MGM did in the early years) – or fell prey to the whims of European producers bound and tied to imposing commercial restrictions on forthcoming projects (as with his 1958 Where the Hot Wind Blows) the results could be unequivocally disastrous. It scarcely strikes one as surprising, then, that Dassin’s legacy is confined to a mere handful of films. Despite the lackluster outings scattered in-between and around such efforts, Dassin should receive greater attention and evaluation for what he did well than the many efforts that turned out poorly. That the same individual could be responsible for Night and the City, Brute Force, Rififi, Topkapi and Never on Sunday (while working within the American and European studio systems much of the time) is no mean accomplishment. Most journeyman directors who spend much of their careers under the studio thumb only dream of gracing such heights; Dassin’s only real liability is that he never quite managed to make the crossover necessary to establish his own personal voice as a moviemaker.

* - Let it be said, however – with no small degree of irony – that this film resoundingly flopped in 1950 and took years to amass its current following as a “rediscovered” classic.