Jules Dassin, the blacklisted American filmmaker who was a master of film noir, directing such classics as "Brute Force," "The Naked City" and "Rififi," died Monday in an Athens hospital. He was 96.
The cause of death was not made public. The Associated Press reported that he had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, April 02, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 25 words Type of Material: Correction
Dassin obituary: The obituary in Tuesday's California section on director Jules Dassin labeled his "The Tell-Tale Heart" a feature film. It was a 20-minute short.
"Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and true friend," Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in a statement. "His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."
Dassin, considered one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era, directed his most influential film, "Rififi," while living in France after being blacklisted as a communist in the early 1950s. "Rififi" earned him a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955.
"Rififi" is the "benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against," Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote in 2000 when it was re-released in the United States.
The film was widely considered the prototype for films like "Ocean's Eleven" and "Mission: Impossible." Dassin himself made another film based on "Rififi," 1964's "Topkapi," which starred Melina Mercouri, whom he had worked with on the popular English-language film "Never on Sunday," in which she played a good-hearted prostitute. Dassin and Mercouri later married.
Turan said the influence of "Rififi" "is hard to overstate." The critic wrote that one section of the film is "a model of tension and precision." In the sequence, Dassin spends "a full 30 minutes on the actual robbery, a completely wordless half-hour (though it makes good use of sound effects) that racks the nerves and provides a master class in breaking and entering as well as filmmaking."
Dassin was born on Dec. 18, 1911, in Middletown, Conn., one of eight children of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, a barber, moved the family to New York City. Dassin graduated from high school in the Bronx.
He got into show business as an actor in New York's Yiddish theater in the mid-1930s. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing, first on the New York stage and then in films.
In the early 1940s, Dassin went to Hollywood, eventually working for MGM, Universal and 20th Century Fox. His first feature film for MGM was "The Tell-Tale Heart" which was followed by "Nazi Agent," released in 1942. He did several other average films for MGM, including "The Canterville Ghost" (1944) and "A Letter for Evie" (1946).
