Jules Dassin

Brute Force

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Captain Munsey and Joe Collins

Time has diluted the impact of Brute Force, but this prison drama from 1947 remains a good film, largely because it doesn’t live up to the title. There is brutishness, but not too much. For much of its length, in fact, it’s a study of character, of how men who are all packed together in an overcrowded prison get along together, or don’t. Richard Brooks wrote the screenplay and Jules Dassin directs. This was the first of Dassin’s run of great movies – The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, Night and the City and Rififi would follow. Burt Lancaster is the star, in his first film since his breakout in The Killers, and slots … Read more

Thieves’ Highway

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Mike Figlia, a haggling customer and Nick

Jules Dassin is so associated with Rififi (aka the best heist movie ever) that his other films tend to get eclipsed. Here’s 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, one of his run of great movies, which had got underway with Brute Force two years earlier. It’s the story of a guy who comes back from the war to find that his immigrant dad Yanko, a truck driver, has lost his legs in an accident and been swindled out of all of his money by an unscrupulous wholesaler. Determined to find answers, Nick buys a truck and takes to the road himself. Dassin gives us a movie that’s three things simultaneously. At one level a movie about … Read more

Night and the City

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Harry with a silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral behind

Night and the City is often described as the best film noir out of the UK. It was made by an American director with a French sounding name, Jules Dassin, which is poetically appropriate at least since the US is the home of noir and it was the French who coined the term. The title is surely the noirest of the noir – both night and the city are key elements of the genre. But this is London-based, and with a vengeance. Dassin, having fled the House UnAmerican Committee’s McCarthyite witch hunt after taking Twentieth Century-Fox’s Darryl F Zanuck’s advice to make himself scarce and head to London, took full advantage of a … Read more