Director: Jules Dassin
Year Released: 1954
Rating: 3.0
Cold, detached, dare I say ... "hard-boiled" look at a "perfect" bank robbery ingeniously constructed but still bungled and fatal. The first hour is sheer perfection style-wise - Dassin's characters can pass for hoods, the mood and shifty camera are influenced by Hollywood's early noirs and the silent bank robbery itself has to be one of the best sequences in all of film (to be rivaled, perhaps, by Dassin himself, with Topkapi). I even like the little touches he tosses in there - the impotence of the police force, the use of the child playing cowboy with a headband while the "grown-ups" shoot it out amongst themselves. But despite my admiration, there's a little concern - the sacrifice for authenticity comes in identification; all the characters are sleazy thugs without any real human dimension. That Cagney could have made you love and hate him at the same time was a something of a cinematic marvel, and it's unfortunate no one here reaches that level. Without Dassin, Truffaut, Godard and Tarantino would have had to borrow from DeMille.
