Key
Collaborators: Mark Hellinger (Producer), Howard
Duff (Leading Character Player), William Daniels (Cinematographer),
Miklos Rozsa (Composer), Nick De Maggio (Editor), John DeCuir (Production Designer)
Highly Recommended:
Thieves' Highway (1949), Night
and the City (1950), Rififi (1955)
Recommended: Brute
Force (1947), The Naked City (1948)
250 Quintessential Noir Films:
Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Thieves' Highway (1949),
Night and the City (1950)
"The
reputation of Jules Dassin rests on five crime thrillers, three
of which were made in Hollywood before he was forced to leave
the United States for political reasons. An ineffectual mixture
of comedies and dramas characterized Jules Dassin's early films
until he made Brute Force (1947), a tough prison drama." -
Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)
"Between
the mid-1940s and the late 1950s, Jules Dassin directed some of
the better realistic, hard-bitten, fast-paced crime dramas
produced in America, before his blacklisting and subsequent move
to Europe. However, while he has made some very impressive
films, his career as a whole is lacking in artistic cohesion...The
villain in his career is the blacklist, which tragically clipped
his wings just as he was starting to fly. Indeed, he could not
find work in Europe for five years, as producers felt American
distributors would automatically ban any film with his signature." -
Rob Edelman (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
1991)
"His
early films showed great promise, and include the superb prison
drama Brute Force (1947), the cop rite-of-passage movie
The Naked City (1948), and two of the very best film
noir thrillers ever produced, Thieves' Highway
(1949), and Night and the City (1950)...Dassin's hokum
period only began when he arrived in Europe and met Melina
Mercouri, and its apogee came with the cheery, teary, weary,
Never on Sunday (1960)." -
Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)
"His early American films (Brute Force, 47: Naked City,
48) are etched in the hard, cold shadowy world of the film
noir and semi-documentary. Later European work has a
primitive passion (La Loi, 58: Never on Sunday,
60)." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)
