Noir master directed caper classic 'Rififi'

But "Brute Force" (1947), the violent prison film starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn, marked a striking change in direction to grittier fare. That was followed by "Naked City" (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; "Thieves' Highway" (1949), a gritty film about independent truckers battling a crooked produce wholesaler; and "Night and the City" (1950), a film noir starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. Widmark died last week at 93.

But by the early 1950s, the hunt was on for Communist Party sympathizers in Hollywood, and Dassin's name joined countless others on the blacklist.

Dassin never denied that he had been a Communist Party member. As part of the New York theater scene in the 1930s when the Depression still deeply affected millions of Americans, he was among many who saw the Communist Party as a force of good for working people. He left the party in the late 1930s over its position on the Soviet alliance with Hitler and the party's downplaying of the outbreak of World War II.

In 1951, fellow directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle offered Dassin's name to the House Un-American Activities Committee, saying that Dassin was part of the Hollywood "Communist faction." Although Dassin was never called to testify before the committee, he could not find employment after their testimony. In 1953 he moved his family to France.

Initially, Dassin was unable to find work. But he eventually was asked to write the screenplay for and direct "Rififi," based on a novel by Auguste le Breton. It concerns a group of jewel thieves who in the end have more to fear from one another than from the police. Dassin plays one of the thieves, Cesar, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita.

Dassin told National Public Radio's David D'Arcy in 2000, on the occasion of the U.S. re-release of "Rififi," that when making the film he remembered advice that Alfred Hitchcock had once given him: "Tell them what you're gonna do, and then make them worry about how you're going to do it."

The centerpiece of the film is the now-famous half-hour burglary sequence. The scene is permeated with breathless tension.

"Few avant-garde films have demonstrated so skillfully how time and pace affect perception," film critic Michael Sragow wrote in 2000.