February's Marco Movie Night Theme is......

Feb 08, 2010 15:01


Get Your Heist On (Vol. 1)
Tuesday Feb. 16th at Casa Noyola
6:30pm to Midnite

Oh man, how much do I love heist films? There are so many classics and notable entries in this genre that I was tempted to program a whole series of just heist flicks; however, variety is the spice of life so I'll focus on just one night of heist films - for now. The difficulty then becomes which two do I choose? Huston's seminal The Asphalt Jungle? Kubrick's innovative The Killing? What about entries from master filmmaker Jean Pierre Melville? Sorry, no Bob le Flambeur or Le Cercle Rouge on the list. How about breezy Hollywood caper films (caper films are to comedy what heist films are to tragedy) such as Topkapi, Gambit or the original versions of Ocean's 11 or The Thomas Crown Affair? It wasn't an easy choice but I finally settled on my picks.





Rififi [Du Rififi Chez les Hommes] (1955) / Dir: Jules Dassin
7:00pm to 9:15pm
Widely regarded as one of the most influential noir films to ever come out of France Rififi has been endlessly imitated but never duplicated. In the 1950's American director Jules Dassin was blacklisted and exiled from Hollywood. Desperate for work he fled to France and eventually agreed to helm a low budget adaptation of a seedy French pulp novel; "Du Rififi Chez les Hommes". Dassin was disgusted by the novel's racism and some of its lurid subject matter but he needed the money and he took the job on the condition that he would be allowed to make changes to the story. The sterotypical African and Arabic gangsters became Europeans and a queasy subplot involving necrophilia was summarily jettisoned. Instead, Dassin focused on character development, the details of the actual heist and infused the script with a sense of anger and betrayal - still fresh in Dassin's mind after having been named during the witchhunts of the McCarthy era.

That's not to say that the resulting film isn't brutal at times but the violence is more understandable given the bitterness that drives the central protagonist and what a great protagonist this is; Jean Servais exudes weary charisma as ex-con Tony le Stephanois; a sort of gallic Bogart who knows he's going downhill fast and wants to set things right while he still can. It's only a matter of time before he decides to pull the proverbial "one last job"; a daring jewel heist that becomes the centerpiece of the film and... well, I'll just quote from Jamie Hook's essay that accompanies the Criterion Collection DVD:

"And yet, even in a film of such generous superlatives, something does stand out, towering over it all. For Rififi is that most hallowed of films, a film that contains a monument within. Like the Grand Hall ball in The Magnificent Ambersons or the pickpocketing sequence in Pickpocket or the crop-duster chase in North by Northwest, the virtually silent, gleefully long heist scene at the center of Rififi is a tingling, ecstatic, sustained act of brilliance-a sacrament of the cinema. For an astounding 33 minutes, Dassin removes all dialogue, hushing the soundtrack to the mere sounds of breath-the accidental note from a piano is enough to stop your heart-as we observe the criminal team at work, breaking through the floor, silencing alarms, cracking safes, checking watches, and signaling each other. It is a scene you’ve seen before (shameless imitators have been cannibalizing it for decades), but you will never see it so purely, respectfully done as here. The fetishistic shots of the safecracker’s tools, the rope that comes out of the suitcase already knotted and ready for climbing down, the team’s proprietary language of hand-gesture, the justly famous (and I won’t give it away) conceit of the umbrella-all of these elements are so lovingly described, it makes you want to cry out."




Grand Slam [Ad Ogni Costo] (1967) / Dir: Giuliano Montaldo
9:30pm to 11:30pm

A retired school teacher (Edward G. Robinson, in a glorified cameo) plans a daring jewel robbery to occur during the height of Carnival, Rio De Janiero's largest celebration. Grand Slam has often been compared to Rififi (see the above poster which proclaims "Rio - Rififi Style!") because it too features a dazzling heist scene that occurs in silence but there the similarities end.  While it lack's Rififi's subtlety and sense of romanticized doom it delivers a colorful, fast paced tale set in exotic locations with memorable twists, capitalizes on the then current popularity of Brazilian music and boasts a playful, swinging score from the great Ennio Morricone.

Made during the golden age of international productions Grand Slam features a multinational cast and crew and was shot in Barcelona, Paris, New York, Rome and Rio itself. The team is comprised of four men; a former Nazi colonel turned mercenary (played by the always unhinged Klaus Kinski, a carry over from last month's movie night); a gentle engineer turned toy maker, a crisp British butler who moonlights as a safecracker and a suave gigolo whose job it is to seduce the icy bank secretary (played by Janet Leigh) whose key they need to steal, use and return before she notices it's missing. Half the fun of a heist film is seeing how the thieves ingeniously plan to do the impossible and then watching the filmmakers put the screws to them as the plan, inevitably, begins to go awry.

While not as well recognized as other heist films Grand Slam's reputation has only grown in recent years. Long difficult to see in any format (I first saw it on a bootleg DVD) the film was recently restored released on the Blue Underground label. Recommended!
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