Jules Dassin Movies

Spiro N. Taraviras' Buzz documents the life of celebrated screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides. The film charts his life from his parents fleeing from Turkey in order to avoid prejudice against Armenians, though his meeting and friendship with William Saroyan, and his memories of working on such memorable projects as They Live By Night and Kiss Me Deadly, and Thieves' Highway. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Director Charlotte Kerr interviewed Melina Mercouri (1923-1994) and her husband Jules Dassin for this documentary on their careers and their strong, long-lasting personal relationship. Kerr also uses film clips from the couple's work and includes discussions on the years in which Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood and on his disagreements with MGM. The couple's shared political, cultural, and artistic interests as well as strength of character and sense of humor are excellently conveyed, and although the documentary may stray off the track from time to time because of the sheer amount of material to cover, the two independent personalities and their films will hold most viewers' attention throughout. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The husband and wife team of director Jules Dassin and actress Melina Mercouri, who first enjoyed international success with the comedy Never on Sunday, collaborated for the last time on this powerful drama. Maya (Melina Mercouri) is a famous actress who is returning to the stage for a production of the classic Greek tragedy Medea, in which she will play the title character, a mother who murders her children. Kostas (Andreas Voutsinas), Maya's former lover, will be directing Maya in the production, and when he discovers that Brenda (Ellen Burstyn), an American woman, is housed in a nearby Greek prison for killing her offspring, he suggests that Maya should meet Brenda as a means of better understanding her character. Maya agrees, and their tense and emotional conversation is cross cut with the taxing rehearsals and performance of Medea. While A Dream Of Passion marked the last time Dassin directed Mercouri, they later appeared together in Keine Zufallige Geschichte, a documentary about their life and work. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Nina (Melina Mercouri) is a former silent-film star from Russia who abandons her career to care for her son. She is a single mother -- the boy's father is a famous actor who wants nothing to do with either Nina or her child. She joins an acting troupe where she impersonates a famous French fashion designer, but she leaves the group in Krakow, Poland, when her true identity is discovered. She travels to France, taking several odd jobs in Nice to support her son. When the boy grows to young adulthood, he is recruited to fight during World War II for the French and later the British. He is decorated for valor and returns to locate his estranged mother after two years have passed. Upon arriving home, he finds that his mother had died several years earlier but that she meticulously wrote over 250 letters to give her son moral support and encouragement in the years to come. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Uptight is an updated remake of John Ford's The Informer (35). The Irish Republican rebels of the original are replaced by black activists, Dublin becomes the Cleveland ghetto, and "the troubles" of 1921 are transformed into the days just following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Julian Mayfield plays an itinerant street sweeper who betrays his militant friends to the fuzz, resulting in an underground all-points bulletin to exact vengeance on the squealer. Ruby Dee portrays a prostitute who befriends the snitch as he eludes his revolutionary ex-buddies. Jules Dassin's unrelenting directorial pace is complemented by the driving jazz score of Booker T. Jones. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this French comedy, a toy inventor travels to the factory of his childhood friend, now an industrial magnate, and tries to persuade him to lend financial backing to his newest invention. Unfortunately their reunion is marred by the reopening of old emotional wounds, but fortunately, the inventor's wife smooths things over. Later she discovers love letters written to her adolescent daughter. Trouble ensues when the toymaker begins suspecting his old pal, the industrialist, of writing the letters. He then blackmails his pal with the letters. When his daughter finds a new boyfriend, the inventor abandons his extortion scheme. The two old pals then reconcile and go into business together. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Inspired by Euripedes' tragedy Hippolytus and set in modern times, this allegorical tale centers on the love triangle between a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping magnate, his lonely second wife, and his first-born son. The affair between the wife and her stepson begins soon after she arrives in London to bring him back to Greece so her husband can teach him about shipping and he can marry another tycoon's daughter to cement a new alliance. Though the son quickly falls in love with his beautiful stepmother, he cannot overcome his crushing guilt at having betrayed his father. When the wife learns of her husband's planned betrothal of his son, she becomes enraged and confesses her affair. Great tragedy follows as her husband beats his son senseless while verbally battering the wife. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Jules Dassin, blacklisted during the McCarthy era, directs this routine, ostensibly romantic tale that really courts an underlying theme of the misuse of power. Based on a popular French novel and set in a small Mediterranean town, the story involves a small group of men and the woman several of them desire. The men gather around in the local tavern each evening to play a rather vicious game called "The Law." One man is chosen to dictate to the others, and they have to do what he says, no matter how humiliating. Marietta (Gina Lollobrigida) is the gorgeous servant of Don Cesare (Pierre Brasseur), desired by Francesco, the son of a crime boss (Yves Montand), and by her brother-in-law. She herself has fallen in love with Enrico (Marcello Mastroianni), a poor engineer. Determined to get a dowry and thereby be able to marry Enrico, Marietta turns the tables on the men who play "The Law." ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Jules Dassin -- in his second European film after being driven out of the United States during the years of the house Un-American Activities Committee hearings -- directed this landmark caper film about the planning and execution of a nighttime robbery at a swanky English jewelry shop in the Rue de Rivoli. The story concerns a collection of thieves who band together to commit a seemingly impossible robbery. The gang consists of a tough, straight-talker named Tony Stephanois (Jean Servais); a young man under Tony's tutelage named Jo (Carl Mohner; a happy-go-lucky Italian by the name of Mario Farrati (Robert Manuel); and a safecracker named Cesar (the director Jules Dassin under the pseudonym of Perlo Vita) who likes to jiggle the combinations of women in his off hours. The set piece of the film is an intricate 28-minute sequence that depicts the robbery in detail -- all filmed silently without dialogue or music. After the success of the robbery, the gang barely has time to celebrate when a rival gangster, Pierre Gruuter (Marcel Lupovici), decides that he wants a cut of the take. When Tony's gang refuses to cooperate, Pierre kidnaps Jo's son, and the gang has to get tough with their nemesis. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Jules Dassin's Night and the City opens with cheap grifter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) running for his life through the streets of London. Harry wants to be big-time, and he does not care how he raises cash for his schemes. Like a junkie, he uses and steals from his girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney), a singer at the Silver Fox, a seedy nightclub owned by the physically grotesque Phil Nosseross Francis L. Sullivan. Harry, who also works for Phil steering unsuspecting customers to the club, comes up with a plan to wrest control of professional wrestling from promoter and underworld kingpin Kristo (Herbert Lom) by manipulating Kristo through his father, retired wrestling great Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko). For financial backing, Harry turns to Phil and Phil's wife Helen Googie Withers, both of whom give him the money, but only to further their own ends. When Gregorius is accidentally killed by his protege's upcoming opponent, Strangler (Mike Mazurki), and Phil realizes that Helen is leaving him for Harry, the scheme quickly unravels. Truly a glimpse of hell, Night and the City's distorted visuals and dark symbolism depict an underworld from which there is no escape and in which redemption comes at a very high price. ~ Steve Press, All Movie Guide

Young model Jean Dexter is knocked unconscious and drowned in her own bathtub in her Manhattan apartment, and a lot of jewelry that she supposedly owned is missing. The Naked City is actually about six days in the life of New York City that coincide with the murder and the subsequent investigation by Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor). The account of their work, and the workings of the New York City police department, is interspersed with brief vignettes about the life of the city around them, and, especially, the reaction of residents to the murder and the newspaper reports of the progress of the case. Muldoon and Halloran first must determine why she was killed, which may (or may not) have to do with how a woman with a minimal income came by the jewelry -- was it a love affair gone bad (and if so, with whom?), or something more complex and sinister? Retracing the final 18 months of the victim's life, their investigation reaches out to a mysterious "Philip Henderson" with whom she was supposedly linked romantically, and to Frank Niles (Howard Duff), who's a little too fast-and-loose with the truth when he doesn't have to be to make Muldoon comfortable; to make things more complicated, Muldoon determines that there were at least two men involved with the actual commission of the murder. The victim turns out to have led a wild life, filled with men and parties, and was tied up with several sordid figures. Their investigation carries them into the highest and lowest ends of New York's social strata to find the killer, and it turns out there are a lot of interlocking reasons why at least three men might've wanted her dead. In the process, we get glimpses of the private lives of the detectives, which was something new in movies at this time; in the midst of all of this activity, the writers set up a fascinating contrast, in adjacent scenes, between Halloran, his wife, and their young son looking toward the future, with the parents of the dead woman, looking back with bitter regret and recriminations -- no movie ever presented in more subtle fashion the contrast between the zeitgeist of the 1930s and that of the postwar era. The final chase on the Williamsburg Bridge is one of the classic pieces of suspense cinema, as the armed and desperate killer races up the walkway past children playing and adults strolling, while detectives close in on foot from behind and patrol cars come up from ahead, with crowded subways rolling past, and then into the superstructure of the bridge for a stand-off and shootout. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot future character leads Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, Kathleen Freeman, and Arthur O'Connell as well as familiar faces Tom Pedi, John Randolph, Molly Picon, and Walter Burke in the supporting cast. Cinematographer William Daniels and editor Paul Weatherwax won Oscars for their work, but awards might just as easily have been presented to director Jules Dassin, writers Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, composers Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner, and, most notably, to producer/narrator Mark Hellinger, who intoned the closing monologue, which opens with one of the most famous tag lines in movie history: "There are eight million stories in the Naked City." ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

One of two con-artists ends up arrested and given five days of freedom before he must go to jail. This comedy chronicles those five days. The man loves to eat; knowing that prison food is lousy, he decides to spend his days stuffing himself with the finest foods available. He is accompanied to numerous 4-star restaurants by his partner and the arresting officer. Each of these two are interested in learning where he stashed a half-million dollars in loot. Eventually the man begins looking at his lovely partner and thinking of things other than his stomach. This leads to marriage. After serving his time, he and his bride go on to lead honest lives. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The whimsical Oscar Wilde fantasy yarn The Canterville Ghost is updated to WW2 in this economical but attractively produced MGM filmization. Charles Laughton plays Sir Simon de Canterville, a feckless 17th century British aristocrat who, after proving himself a coward on the field of honor, is walled up alive in his own castle by his unforgiving father (Reginald Owen). Sir Simon's ghost is doomed to haunt the corridors of Canterville Hall until one of his descendants performs a conspicuous act of bravery. 300 years later, the castle is billetted by a platoon of American soldiers-one of whom, Cuffy Williams (Robert Young), is of course a distant relation to Sir Simon. The ghost of Canterville Hall does his best to frighten away the American "intruders", but he's a fairly incompetent spirit, incapable of frightening even the young mistress of the castle, 8-year-old Lady Jessica (Margaret O'Brien). Upon learning of his family legacy, Cuffy begins worrying that he, too, will prove to be a coward when the chips are down, but with the help of the Ghost and the stalwart Lady Jessica, Cuffy is able to summon up his innate courage. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot Peter Lawford in a tiny role as Sir Simon's ill-fated brother, and cult figure Tor Johnson as Simon's fearsome jousting opponent. Though never remade theatrically, The Canterville Ghost resurfaced in TV-movie form 1986 and 1996. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide