In Remembrance: Jules Dassin

     Jules Dassin, the director of the noir classic The Naked City, has passed away on March 31, 2008 in Athens, Greece. He was 96.

     Dassin’s career in Hollywood was at its height in the late 1940s, thanks to a trio of powerful film noirs- Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves’ Highway (1949). Of these, The Naked City made the biggest impression, being one of the first Hollywood productions to shoot extensively on location in New York City including the City Morgue, the Roxy Theater and the Williamsburg Bridge. The film is credited with creating the police procedural genre and ended with the famous line, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” It would also spawn a television spin-off and inspire numerous other films and television series including Dragnet, Hill Street Blues and the CSI and Law & Order franchises.

     Born on December 11, 1918 in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin acted in New York’s Yiddish theater before moving to Hollywood to direct films at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. His first film was a 20-minute short adapting Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” in 1941. He followed with his first feature, the thriller Nazi Agent, a year later. MGM would assign Dassin to a variety of projects including the romance Reunion In France (1942) and the comedy The Canterville Ghost (1944).

     But Dassin was an active Communist who wouldn’t back renounce his political beliefs when fellow director Edward Dmytrk identified him to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blacklisted, Dassin moved to Europe to continue his career.

     Arriving in London in 1950, he filmed Night And The City with Richard Widmark. Moving on to France, he made the heist caper Rififi in 1955. Based on a novel by Auguste le Breton, the movie remains notable for the thirty-minute section in its middle in which the criminals’ jewel heist is played out completely silent with no dialogue or music.

     By 1957, Dassin was in Greece directing He Who Must Die, based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis. After shooting Italian/French co-production The Law in 1959, Dassin returned to Greece for 1960’s Never On Sunday, in which he also starred opposite future-wife Melina Mercouri. Dassin would receive two Academy Award nominations, for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, for Never On Sunday. Dassin would marry Mercouri after directing her in a second film, the heist caper Topkapi.

     Dassin’s output went into decline as the late 1960s gave way to the 1970s, theough his 1978 film A Dream Of Passion did receive the Golden Palm at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

     His final film was 1980’s Circle Of Two.