Rififi

 Moving pictures aspire to communication that is wordless.  This is why silent films remain the purest expression of the art.  Rififi, a French heist movie, produced in 1955 demonstrates this proposition.  About a third of this complex crime film is unencumbered by dialogue.  The wordless sequences in the film are its most indelible and gripping.  

Rififi is French gangster argot for a "ruckus", a melee, or "rough and tumble".  Even French bourgeois viewers would have trouble with the exotic word and, so, the director and screenwriter, Jules Dassin, contrives a night club scene in which a sultry chanteuse sings a tune explaining the term.  The picture is a pretty standard heist movie, except for the fact that this film (along with The Asphalt Jungle) more or less invented the genre and establishes its fundamental themes and imagery.  A hardened, laconic crook, called the Stephanois, gets out of stir.  His first objective is to punish his girlfriend for her treachery -- she informed on him, resulting in his conviction.  (He also sacrificed himself to keep a young accomplice who is a family man from being sent to prison).  The Stephanois finds his girlfriend, now a rival gangster's moll, at a tawdry night club called L' Age d'Or (homage to Bunuel and the film's set decorator Alexander Trauner who worked on the thirties' surrealist classic).  In a startling scene, the protagonist makes his girlfriend strip and beats her with a sort of chain, scarring her back --  the marks on her body trigger the series of catastrophes at the end of the film.  Stephanois is gaunt, still smoking, although he has a hacking tubercular cough.  He's a bit like Humphrey Bogart at the end of his tether.  The crook assembles a team of of criminals to burglarize a jewelry shop in central Paris.  The shop is equipped with a state-of-the-art safe and an alarm system set to a hair-trigger response to vibrations anywhere in its vicinity.  The burglars practice with exemplars of the safe and alarm system and, then, in a bravura scene execute their heist -- this involves breaking and entering, chiseling through floors, disabling the hair-trigger alarm, and, at last, boring through the thick iron walls of the safe.  (This is the first extended wordless sequence, silent except for the whine of drills and the tapping of chisels -- a sort of ballet that lasts about 30 minutes.)  Although there are some close-calls, the heist is perfectly executed and the crooks get away with 220 million dollars in gems.  But catastrophe follows immediately on the heels of the successful robbery.  The safe-cracker, a dapper little man who seems to be Italian (he's played by Dassin himself) snatches an emerald ring for his squeeze -- the safe-cracker is an inveterate ladies' man.  The rival gangsters at the L'Age d'Or immediately perceive that the girl is sporting a big, flashy ring and force her to admit the gem's provenance.  (The scarred back of the gangster's moll also is tip-off that the Stephanois is out of the slammer.) These gangsters, led by a suave thug named Grutter, include a dope addict and some other violent and menacing crooks.  They immediately scheme to waylay Stephanois' band of burglars with the plan to torture them into surrendering their ill-gotten gains.  A lot of brutal mayhem ensues.  Ultimately, Grutter kidnaps the family man's little boy.  Stephanois' mistress forgive him the beating that he administered to her -- apparently, kidnaping a child is a bridge too far for her and she informs the protagonist where he can find the rival gangster.  Stephanois hunts his adversaries down and, in a final gun battle at a villa under construction outside of Paris, manages to kill them.  But he's badly wounded -- like Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle, the hero drives desperately through country and town as he's bleeding out.  This is the second extended silent sequence -- the dying gangster has the four-year old boy that he has rescued in the car with him; the kid is dressed as a cowboy and brandishing a toy pistol in the convertible that the Stephanois drives swerving and careening into the oncoming lane into the very heart of Paris.  The little kid squeals with joy and points his gun in the air, an image of demonic, mindless violence. It's exhilarating and horrific at the same time.   

Dassin was an American director who had been blacklisted and, so, forced to work abroad.  Rififi takes its time with the heist scene, but once the gems have been boosted, the film roars into high-gear and the mise-en-scene is ferocious doom incarnate -- interestingly, the cops and the law have nothing to do with the destruction of the gang of burglars.  This film is font from which movies like Thief, Mission Impossible, and a thousand others derive.  The film is also a primary source for much of the imagery in Truffaut and Godard's early nouveau vague films.  It's raw, tough, and brilliantly made