What a strange word Revive! Movie only Jules Dassin Lighting up movie billboards in 1955 and 1956, this unusual word became synonymous with the botched heist, with a crime town, and a spiral of bad luck that never seemed to leave anyone unscathed. Some believe that this is the name of the famous protagonist Tony Lou Stefano, played by the Belgian Jan Service. But no, it was an abbreviation of the original title Please tell the menWhich made the movie famous all over the world.
Revive It was the first film that its director, Jules Dassin – whose name sounded good in French – was able to make after five years on the McCarthyist blacklists, after fleeing the United States due to persecution and convictions. This was the first French film about the world of heists that John Huston had just opened in the early 1950s. While the city sleeps (1950). It was the international film that sealed the fatal fate of the crime, that poetic tour of the Arc de Triomphe, a farewell to life and fleeting glory, one of the classics to come.
this year Rustic Celebrated 70 years since its premiere, Which marked before and after for Heist movieAs they called it in Hollywood. It was not the first film in the French noir series, which already had a long tradition since silent cinema with the noir epic. Fantomas Directed by Louis Feuillade. He had some features in what is called poetic realism, such as: Pepe le moco (1937), from Julien Duvivier also dawn (1939), from Marcel CarneyShe was not the pioneer of that so-called renaissance Polarity In the 1950s, ever since Jack Baker He has entered the ranks of crime with Grisby (1954), with Jean Gabin Like a veteran gangster now Lino Ventura Debut on camera. Despite this, Revive Leaving an indelible mark on history, he set his contemporaries apart – just look at his immediate influence Sect of the Damned (1956), from Stanley Kubrick– It was an unexpected success for the cinema that was repositioning itself on the international scene after the end of World War II, and saved Dassin from the ostracism that his forced exile in Europe had brought him.
Revive It was born by chance, initially as a new adaptation of the literature of the prolific writer Auguste Le Breton, who was the author of raidan unusual exploration of the world of drugs, was directed by Henri Dequene and released in the same 1955. Le Breton later became famous for films such as Player Bob (1956)Written by Jean-Pierre Melville. Gangsters in Paris (1957), by Gilles Grangier And of course to Sicilian clanwith the trio formed by Gabin, Ventura and Alain Delon already in the late 1960s.
Fifteen years ago, the Le Breton novels published by Gallimard were still not recognized as novels. Polarity In cinema, the material was for Dassin a kind of continuation of his work in the B series in Hollywood. Why was someone chosen by French producers who on the other side of the Atlantic had no more qualifications than a handful of low-budget films like? The naked city (1948) or An evil obsession (1950)?
Once in Paris, Dassin caused a minor scandal. In the spring of 1953, as he prepared to direct his first film in his adopted country—a vehicle for comedian Fernandel—the leader of the Hollywood Anti-Communist League, Roy Brewer, allied with the FBI to intimidate the film’s producer and co-star, Zssa-Gabor. It was then that Dassin ended up being fired, which sparked widespread anger among French directors and screenwriters.
Producer Henri Bérard saw the opportunity to employ the immigrant and capitalize on the controversy that seemed to surround him – as well as the success he had achieved in Paris. The naked city– at the expense of Melville, who at that time enjoyed the status of only his first work, The silence of the sea. What Dassin brought was a sense of naturalism that did not yet exist in French cinema, and which brought to mind the pulse of neo-realism and the vertigo of Hollywood’s B-cinema, with films such as Crazy gun (1950), from Joseph Lewis Or the same ones that Dassin photographed in his homeland.
“For the French Revive It had Hollywood glamor. To Americans, it exuded continental sophistication; For both he had a reliable naturalism, though imbued with a certain enthusiasm carried by the nocturnal Pigalle. The critic J. “For the rest of the world, he had everything,” Hoberman said in his review of the film for the Criterion Channel.
When Dassin was finally selected, he completed the work of translating the novel into English in just six days, then commissioned screenwriter René Weller to translate it into French. The director hated the novel, and was disgusted by the fact that the rival gangsters were dark-skinned Arabs and North Africans facing off against white Europeans. He also opposed the producer’s idea of making the rivals a gang of American thieves and decided to downplay their importance in the story and give them a surname of Germanic origin like Grutter. Furthermore, the book described disturbing events such as necrophilia, scenes that Dassin did not know how to put on screen. Then he decided to delve deeper into the robbery scene, which in the book only took up a few pages, and in the final shots, it extended to more than half an hour without dialogue or music.
The film was produced on a small budget (so small that Jules Dassin claimed that people did not believe him when he told them it cost only $200,000), which is why many inexperienced actors and technicians were hired for the production. For the main role he chose Jan Servicean actor whose career had declined due to his addiction to alcohol, was asked to play the role of Italian gangster Mario Ferrati Robert Manuel After seeing him play a comedic role as a member of French comedy. Suggest the product to the beginner Karl Mohner For the role of Joe the Swede, he himself played the Italian safecracker, Caesar Milani. He explained in an interview: “I hired a very good actor in Italy, I don’t remember his name, but he never signed the contract!… So I had to wear a mustache and play the part.”
Filming took place throughout the winter of 1955 in Paris and in real locations. Some of the simple sets used were designed by Alexander Trauner, one of the most important artistic directors in the history of cinema. He did this because of his friendship with Dassin and a little money. Dassin himself barely earned $8,000 for writing the screenplay and directing the film, and when he visited the Cannes Film Festival that year he was still covered in debt.
He spotted a producer at the casino, asked him for money to bet and eventually won. His family was able to live on this money for a while. An example of a few ways to maintain production is the scene in which Joe and Mario tell Tony of their intention to rob the jewelry store. Between and the web (The British equivalent of Tiffany’s & Co., whose Paris store is located near Place Vendôme). The team placed a table and three chairs in front of a fake window frame in the middle of the street to create the illusion that they were sitting in a café in front of the jewelry store.
Details of the robbery scene are taken from a real robbery that occurred in 1899 in Cours Saint-Louis in Marseille. A gang then broke into the offices of a travel agency, blasted a hole in the floor and, using an umbrella to collect the rubble, took considerable loot from the jewelery shop below.
Dassin’s staging shows remarkable finesse throughout the 32 minutes during which the heist takes place, mapping the specific sounds of the clash of tools, the buzz of the drill and the clicking of the plaster falling onto the canopy containing it, in perfect harmony and synchronization, with the brief interruption of a quickly sounding alarm. The composer chosen for the film is George OrrickHe wanted to include a song for the scene, but Dassin showed him that silence was best. The song that sings Majli Noel At the L’Age d’Or cabaret (a tribute to the director’s surrealist film Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali) He just had to explain what the title meant, which was typical of the military slang that Le Breton used as a synonym for chaos and confusion.
With the assembly completed, Revive It was shortlisted at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Jules Dassin Award for Best Director. For example -Something like common- with Sergey Vasiliev by Mountain heroes (1955). “It was the most elegant, cinematically intelligent and meticulously imitated film in Dassin’s filmography,” explains Huberman, “a powerful mixture of insider knowledge and outsider strangeness (…) with an overflowing atmosphere, populated by characters with slanted fedoras, slouchy Gauloise trousers and names like Teddy the Levantine, Revive It exudes a simplistic style, especially if the bullet arabesques of the climax are included in the riotous finale. “There is nothing more Parisian than that lyrical ending filmed in a dance around the Arc de Triomphe where Tony dies and his friend’s son shoots like in a Western movie. Tragedy achieved.
“Cinema notebooks A two-part interview with Jules Dassin, conducted by Young Claude Chabrol and François TruffautWhen the film premiered in Paris in April 1955; Truffaut later devoted two glowing reviews to it, stating that “Among the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin is the best.” Film noir “Which I saw,” Huberman explains. In fact, this term Film noir It had just been born as a critical category, while the article “Panorama of Film Noir” had appeared only a few months earlier with the signature of Raymond Bord and Étienne Chaumeton, who, in addition to praising Dassin’s previous films in Hollywood, praised Revive As “a film in which Paris is ever-present, it is not the Paris of sophisticated comedy, but a hostile city shrouded in fog.”
Dassin has created the only “authentic” film of the French noir series, a film that will be endlessly imitated, with its surgical and silent heists, its thieves marked by tragedy and betrayal, and its gray and cold winter atmosphere, with the police arriving when it’s all over. A flawless farewell to Tony Le Stefano’s impossible dream.