He Who Must Die

He Who Must Die (aka Celui Qui Doit Mourir)(Jules Dassin, 1957) A French production of a Greek story directed by an ex-patriated (and blacklisted) American, He Who Must Die is based on a story by Nikos Kazantzakis (who also wrote the novels that formed the basis of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ). 

The time is 1921 during the midst of the Greco-Turkish Wars. Turk forces are taking over Greek cities and if there is no cooperation from the populace, they are burned to the ground and its people forced to relocate. Such is the fate of one such nameless town, and its priest, Father Fotis (Jean Servais—the star of Rififi), gathers his flock to make them ready to embark on a journey by foot in the Greek wilderness, to find help and land to restart their devastated community and a new way of life in exile. One old man carries the bones of his father and grandfather in a sack on which to build the foundation of their new imagined town, the church being its center.

As they start their journey, it is a time of celebration in the occupied town of Lycovrisi, overseen by the Turk governor Agha (Gregoire Aslan). Every seven years, they stage their own version of the Passion Play, the participants chosen by the town priest Grigoris (Fernand Ledoux) and the mayor Patriarchos (Gert Frobe): a mendacious peddler Yannakos (Rene LeFevre) is chosen to play the apostle Peter; the mayor's son Michelis (Maurice Ronet) will play the apostle John; Kostandis (Lucien Raimbourgh), the cafe owner is chosen to play James; the town butcher, Panagiotaras (Roger Hanin) will play Judas, a role he rejects but is forced upon him; and the most surprising choices are the town's widow (and prostitute) Katerina (Melina Mercouri) to play Mary Magdalene, and a stuttering, shy shepherd Monolios (Pierre Vaneck) is chosen to play Christ.

At first, the players are unnerved by the heavy responsibility of their roles (especially Manolios, who is afraid to speak in front of crowds), but the authoritarian Grigoris will not change his mind. The Passion Play will go on and the die (and the Play) has been cast. 

But, the arrival of the burned town's refugees changes everything. Flotis implores Grigoris to help his people. They have walked for 21 days and many have died enroute. All they ask is a barren parcel of land and maybe some food to eat until they are established. But, the town priest will have none of it, banishing the refugees, and spreading the idea that the dead among probably didn't die of starvation or exhaustion, but of cholera. The refugees are stunned by the town's lack of charity, but decide to leave—lest they be attacked by the locals—and make their way to an area of the foothills of the mountain Sarakina that overlooks Lycovrisi.

But, their plight, and their priest's harsh attitude toward them, which borders on persecution, stirs something in the Passion players. Yannakos is the first to visit, on a mission from rich townsman Ladas (Dimos Starenios) who has sent him to see if he can take any of the refugees' jewelry in exchange for food or water. But, Yannakos has a crisis of conscience when he goes up the mountain and sees how destitute they are. Michelis soon follows, and then Manolios, who is so moved by the refugees that he finds his voice and implores the people of Lycovrisi to offer charity, despite the derision heaped upon him by Grigoris who tells him that the role of Christ has gone to his head and he's become an anti-Christ. He tells Michelis in private that it is dangerous for a Turk occupied city to help rebels against the Turks.

But, Manolios will not be deterred, and when Michelis, the mayor's son, says that he will help Manolios and the displaced villagers, Grigorios expels him from the village and threatens the shepherd with excommunication. It doesn't even phase Manolios, and Michelis confronts the angry priest with a venomous "If Jesus Christ came back to Earth, he would be crucified again again. And you would be the one to drive the nails in." His fiancee begs him to not go or she'll break off their engagement, but Michelis is steadfast. He will go with Monolios. His betrayal of his father and the town, causes the mayor to fall under ill health. But Michelis will inherit the town, the deeds, everything, when his father dies and such is his convictions that he is willing to give the people in the mountains the deeds to start a new life.

The priest, Grigoris, will not stand for that. His authority has been defied, and Manolios' message already shows the danger of spreading, further undermining his own power. So he goes to the Turk Agha and tells him that if he wants to keep control of the village and, eventually, occupied Greece, that he must quell the rebellion. He demands that Agha bring Manolios to him personally—for what purposes he doesn't say, but it probably won't be Confirmation. Probably more like Last Rites.

Agha takes an armed guard and goes to the compound in the city where Michelis has taken in some of the refugees and Manolios goes over the barricade to talk to him. The Turk tells him that Grigoris just wants to talk, that he (Agha) is a politician, not a fighter, but if Manolios really wants to do some good, he'll come quietly, so that Agha doesn't order his men to fire on the people behind the barricade. Manolios ponders, takes a stick, attacks the soldier manning the mounted machine gun and runs. Volleys fire back and forth—men on either side are killed, and Manolios is taken prisoner.

Dassin is in his element here. His years in Hollywood before the blacklist gave him ample opportunity to hone his craft and purge himself of any indulgences and take a harder edge with his subject matter. His approach is straightforward, unsentimental, but no less, for want of a better term, impassioned. And his work on social issues and the world of film-noir provides a bitter undercurrent to what is a religious film...in Cinemascope, no less.

I'm not sure what the issue is, but it is a tough road to buy a copy of He Who Must Die—you can see a rather dulled, sub-titled version online, slightly cropped of its full Cinemascope width, but at least it's not pan-and-scanned. Maybe the ideas are a little...revolutionary, but that's not stopped films before. It's safe to say that Dassin would later strive to make better films, more far-reaching films, but never one as powerful as this one. It might be his masterpiece.

Rififi

Rififi (aka "Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes") (Jules Dassin, 1955)

It's not a word that people use/

Among the "swells" and "Who's Who"/

Rififi

It's the lingo of the streetwise/

The battle cry of real tough guys/

So don't try your brain and grumble/

All it means is "rough and tumble"

Rififi

A vital missing piece (in my viewing, anyway) in the career of director Jules Dassin (of Middleton Connecticut, Harlem and the Bronx—it's pronounced "Dass'-in,") is this second European film of his exile from America and the Hollywood Black List (he had not made a film since 1950's Night and the City, which he'd filmed in London at the behest of producer Darryl F. Zanuck). Rififi is not well regarded as literature (Francois Truffaut said at the time of its release "Out of the worst crime novels I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen."), and Dassin was not the first choice as director (that was Jean-Pierre Melville-I'll have to look at Le Samouraï one of these days), but he needed a job, and managed to turn the book (which he also didn't like) into a cracklingly dark caper movie about a motley crew of thieves knocking over a jewelry store. The leader, Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais in a nicely played, tubercular performance that recalls Humphrey Bogart) isn't interested, having just served a stretch in prison for a previous crime, but relents after finding his girl having taken up with a local gangster. Rather than the fast snatch-and-grab proposed to him, though, he up's the ante, going all in only if, rather than just grabbing some jewels, the group steals the entire contents of the store's safe, the latest in security.

The scheme is elaborate, involving casing the joint for police walk-by's, then doing a home-invasion of the apartment above it, and drilling through the floor/ceiling to gain access in order to disarm the high-tech, high-sensitivity alarm system. This sequence, which works out to nearly half an hour of screen-time is un-scored, reliant on natural sound...and as the heist occurs in the middle of the night, every screeching, tearing, hammering sound could betray the entire operation. It's a nail-biter, one of the better crimes in film history, and the model for every highly planned knock-over since.

The robbery is the big set-piece, but it's merely the middle of the film. It's buttressed by the set-up and subsequent fall-out resulting in a rival gang's extortion, a kidnapping, and the gradual dissolution of the gang, a section that, after the tension of the robbery, becomes more and more free-wheeling, taking off, playing on the relationships established in the film's first third, the audience's complicity in the robbery, and by itself, becoming a tour de force. At the same time, it makes an interesting change-up from the rest of the film as "le Stéphanois" becomes a one-man wrecking crew, balefully upholding his criminal code while also trying to "do the right thing," culminating in a desperate drive through Paris that has a thrilling manic intensity with nary a car crash nor explosion (why, they don't even crash through a fruit-stand).

Rififi is a showcase for Dassin's talents* as an adapter and director, taking the noir film back to the place where the phrase was first coined, by one of "da guys" in Hollywood who'd created and perfected the dark mysteries of the genre, and making it work no matter which city streets are drenched with a forbidding rain.  

* The production of Rififi was so hurried—Dassin wrote the script in six days—and strapped for cash that when an Italian actor he'd chosen for the safe-cracker failed to receive his contract, Dassin just took over the role himself.  There is some irony there: (SPOILER ALERT) the character of Cesar ultimately gives away the mob to a rival gang and suffers a fate for it. Dassin, had fled the the U.S. and his successful Hollywood career as director Edward Dmytryk had named him as a communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee.