Films from Abroad: Crime Wave

Abstract

ONE OF THE MORE interesting films to appear recently on the local screen is the French production Rififi. It shows in considerable detail the planning and execution of a jewel robbery, and this part of the film is skillfully and absorbingly done. The problems of how to enter the store, how to silence the burglar alarm, and how to open the safe, are all treated with a scientific dispassion that is in the best traditions of the perfect crime school. If the solutions are not always entirely probable, they are at least satisfactory for the purposes of the film. And the itself is carried out with admirable expedition, in an exciting half-hour sequence which is uninterrupted by dialogue. The end of the picture is quite disappointing, however, in that it pursues the criminals to their untimely deaths for the sole purpose of demonstrating once again that does not pay. One of the criminals accidentally betrays the rest through a passing affair with a woman, and is speedily shot for his mistake; another becomes involved in gang warfare because of his love for his son; and a third is fatally wounded when he comes to the aid of one of his companions. Each of them, in other words, is eventually killed because of his need for human companionship-a point that is rather mawkishly made, and has little relevance to the rest of the film. The result is a wholesale slaughter somewhat reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's more sanguinary novels. It attains such horrifying proportions as to have very little meaning. And the final sequence, where the most hardened member of the gang, who clearly has only a few minutes left to live, drives the little son of his dead comrade home to mother, is maudlin in the extreme. It is perhaps notable that Jules Dassin, who directed and