Du rififi chez les hommes (Jules Dassin, 1955)

1. Du rififi chez les hommes(Jules Dassin, 1955)

2. What is genre? • Used by film industry to organise production and marketing, and by spectators to guide viewing • Generic approach often opposed to auteurist approach • Genre associated with popular, industrial culture; authorship with high art - but genre also ‘a frame and stimulus’ for production (Cowie 1993: 128) • Genre is a framework of structuring rules guiding the production and reception of films • Identification of generic films requires pre-existing concept of genre • Description complicated by evaluation: identification of a ‘classic’ period and its decline • Generic production characterised by difference within repetition: ‘A major aspect of genre and hence of genre study is the extent to which any particular work exceeds its genre, how it reworks and transforms it, rather than how it fits certain generic expectations’ (Cowie 1993: 128)

3. Genre and iconography • recurring images, settings, props, costumes, etc. that generate expectation in the viewer

4. Genre and history • Many genres tied to American history: • The western and the agrarian past (genre popular 1930s-40s) • Crime genre and the urban present (popular 1930s-50s) • Science fiction and technological future (1950s, ’70s, ’90s, 2010s) • Do genres reflect reality or simply other films?

5. The Crime/Gangster Genre • Development linked to US Prohibition and celebrity gangsters in 1920s • Films popular with audiences and cheap to make • Trouble with Hays Production Code for glamorising crime • Gangsters/cops become interchangeable

6. The gangster as capitalist • ‘Every regime has the mythology it deserves… the heroes of “the free world” remain gangsters and their Olympus can be found in the Underworld. If the gangster film comes to us from the United States, the mecca of capitalism, then that isn’t by chance.’ (Georges Sadoul, quoted in Phillips 2009: 88). • Robert Warshow (1970): gangster film as reflection of contradictions in American capitalism; ‘gangster as tragic hero’, inevitability of his death

7. Film noir • A genre? A period? A movement? A series? A cycle? A sub-genre? An aesthetic that spreads beyond crime/gangster genre • approx. The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958) • often B-pictures made by European émigré directors: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak… (influence of German Expressionism?) • focus on corruption and despair, paranoia and claustrophobia • influence of ‘hard-boiled’ fiction: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain

8. French influences on film noir? • ‘Within the framework of urban crime, [Georges] Simenon played down action, suspense and violence and replaced them with the powerful evocation of a visual, aural and thematic “atmosphere” – of dark, rain-soaked quotidian-ness, of routine lives shattered by crime or the “derailing” of the central character.’ (Vincendeau 2007: 25)

9. Style and mood in film noir • Atmospheric visual cues: night scenes, rain, oblique lines and fractured light • Low-key, chiaroscuro lighting • Framing devices (shutters, blinds, banisters, fences) • Mood of fear and insecurity – related to historical conditions post-war? • Misogyny – related to changing social and economic role of women?

10. American thrillers in France • The term film noir coined by a Frenchman, Nino Frank, in 1946 • The Postman Always RingsTwice filmed as Le DernierTournant (1939) and Ossessione (1942) before being made in Hollywood in 1946 • Gallimard launched its ‘Série Noire’ collection in 1945

11. The French Crime Thriller • No production code: easier to depict criminal activity, violence, sex • Yet ‘the French gangster films of the 1950s are heirs to the 1930s films, displaying a French taste for minimalist intimate realism over action.’ (Vincendeau 2007: 39) • Mythology develops around use of slang and locations: Pigalle, Montmartre

12. Slang in the French crime thriller • Touchez pas au grisbi: novel by Albert Simonin, 1953; film directed by Jacques Becker, 1954. • Du rififi chez les hommes: novel by Auguste Le Breton, 1953; film directed by Jules Dassin, 1955. • Razziasur la chnouf: novel by Auguste Le Breton, 1954; directed by Henri Decoin, 1955.

13. Crime cinema and the Second World War in France • Rise in violent crime using weapons left over from war • Historic links between criminal gangs and Resistance • ‘The scripts develop themes of loyalty and betrayal, and whereas these existed in pre-war films, their recurrence often across the traditional law-crime divide, can be read as a metaphor of the corruption of French society by the Gestapo, which had infiltrated both the underground and the police.’ (Vincendeau 2007: 38)

14. Becker, Gabin, Grisbi • Post-war often played Inspector Maigret, incarnating ‘a “lost” France under threat from historical, political and sociological processes, and in which his changing physique plays a crucial role’ (Hewitt 2004: 68) • Grisbi references the camaraderie and ironic fates of Gabin’s 1930s films • Film successful and influential: Becker admired by New Wave critics

15. Rififi: a transnational thriller? ‘Given that the film was a cinematic adaptation of an American-influenced French crime novel, which was then shot in France by an émigré American director, [Du rififi chez les hommes] raises the interesting possibility of a challenge to normative fixed definitions of cultural identity and national cinema at a time when both film critics and political and cultural analysts perhaps sought to express such concerns.’ (Phillips 2009: 1-2)

16. Jules Dassin (1911-2008) • Made his name with noir thrillers like The Naked City (1948), Nightand the City (1950) • Denounced as Communist sympathizer by Edward Dmytryk and blacklisted by House Un-American Activities Committee • Spent later career in exile in France, Italy and Greece

17. Dassin in France • Nominated as an honorary member of the French directors’ union • Interviewed by Cahiers du cinéma, April and May 1955 • Joint winner of Best Director prize, Cannes Film Festival 1955 • Adaptation of Du rififi chez les hommes focuses on male friendship and robbery detail, arguably inaugurates the heist genre

18. Bibliography • Cowie, Elizabeth (1993), ‘Film noir and women’, in Joan Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: A Reader, London: Verso. • Hewitt, Nicholas (2004), ‘Gabin, Grisbi and 1950s France’, Studiesin French Cinema, 4, 1, 65-75. • Phillips, Alastair, Rififi, London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. • Vincendeau, Ginette (2007), ‘French Film Noir’, in Andrew Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 23-54. • Warshow, Robert (1970), The Immediate Experience: Movies,Comics, Theatre and other aspects of popular culture, New York: Atheneum.