As the director of one of the most famous sequences without music or dialogue in cinema history - the 28-minute break-in that forms the centrepiece of Rififi (1955, re-released next Friday) - it makes sense that the 90-year-old Jules Dassin should pick one of the best-loved pictures of the silent era as a film of lasting importance to him.
Not that he will concede any suggestion of conscious influence. "I don't know how to explain that," he says. "I think whatever's in you that might qualify you to make a movie responds to the totality of what you have seen."
Nonetheless, the way he describes Charlie Chaplin's technique as a director on City Lights and his other films hints at an instructive kind of admiration. "Few people talk of Chaplin as a director, but he was very clever, very able. Able in the sense that he knew where to put the camera. He never looked for any great innovations for people to talk about, but he said, 'This is the way it should be seen,' and that is a very important part of movie-making."
He pauses to think of an example. "As we all know, Chaplin was a marvellous dancer, and there's a way to film a dance. You don't film a dance concentrating on the eyebrows. When he would skate, or dance, or in one of the films he's hit on the head with a frying pan and goes staggering on and off the curb for a city block, the camera's in the right place for it. In a sense, that's what we say of the good action directors."
Worlds apart though their films are in genre terms, that's a lesson Dassin could certainly be said to have taken on board for the remarkable run of terse, unadorned films noirs he directed at his career peak: Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and the London-set Night and the City (1950), the first film he directed in Europe when Hollywood blacklisting forced him into exile. He's an American director in the odd position of being best known for a French-language film - the full title of Rififi, for which he was awarded best director at Cannes, is Du rififi chez des hommes.
Jules Dassin, director
Born
Middletown, Connecticut, 1911
Selected films
Nazi Agent (1942)
Renunion in France (1942)
Young Ideas (1943)
Two Smart People (1946)
Brute Force (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
Thieves' Highway (1949)
Night and the City (1950)
Rififi (1956)
He Who Must Die (1958)
Never on a Sunday (1960)
Topkapi (1964)
Circle of Two (1980)
He claims to have given hardly any consideration to directing the celebrated heist sequence in the way he did, unconsciously echoing his remarks about Chaplin when he simply says, "I just thought that was the way it should be done."
Not only did he underestimate the effect it would have on an audience, but he couldn't possibly have predicted how great an influence the film would exert on future directors involved in the genre, from Kubrick (The Killing) through to Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs).
Dassin, who directed his last film in 1980, understandably struggles to remember where and when he first saw City Lights, released in 1931.
"Whenever it came out, that was it. I was in the audience that very first day. I was terribly moved by it, and laughed and cried like everyone else. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen the film, and enjoyed it. I find marvellous things in it every time.
"It has my favourite shot in all of movie-making," he adds. "It's a simple close-up of Chaplin, at the end of the film, that is so very beautiful. It's to me one of the great art-works, that close-up."
The shot comes after the blind flower-girl, played by Virginia Cherrill, has had her sight miraculously restored, and finally realises that Chaplin's Tramp has been her benefactor all along. A title card comes up with the single word, "You?" Chaplin smiles, and points to his eyes. "You can see now?"
"Yes, I can see now!"
The film fades out on the Tramp's serenely happy expression, and the sublimity of the moment makes it feel almost like a swansong for a passing age of silent cinema and its purely visual communication of feeling.
"He just went and broke your heart, that's what he did. The bastard! His love was so pure, so strong, for this girl, and he had this clear knowledge that it would get him nowhere, but he gave his life to her, so to speak."
This is far more than a typical Chaplin film in Dassin's estimation; it somehow transcends the rest.
"In Modern Times, the relationship Chaplin has with the little girl played by Paulette Goddard is charming and lovely, and they're great together, but there's not that total giving of a man to a woman as in City Lights, nor is there in Gold Rush, nor in his other films. No, that was a very special, separate degree of feeling. And there were so many things in it that were so terribly funny. I just treasure the whole film."
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