Thank you, Rialto Pictures, for cleaning up and re-releasing Jules Dassin’s Rififi, an incredible French masterpiece in black and white about a high-stakes jewel heist.  The film, which won Dassin the Best Director award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, is said to have inspired the likes of Quentin Tarantino and François Truffaut, the latter of whom called Rififi the best Film Noir he’d ever seen.

Rififi is set in Paris, where gristly Tony (Jean Servais) has just been popped from the pokey after serving five years for a jewel robbery.  We later learn that Tony took the fall for his young protégé named Jo (Carl Möhner) because of his student’s young wife and son.  After filling his lungs with the sweet air of freedom, Tony quickly finds out that Jo is still involved in the burglary racket and that his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) has taken up with a gangster named Grutter (Marcel Lupovici).

In fact, Jo and his cousin Mario (Robert Manuel) ask Tony if he wants in on their latest endeavor – stealing diamonds from the window display of a prominent jeweler.  At first, Tony balks at the idea, declaring that the store has “more alarms than a firehouse,” but eventually agrees to participate if Jo and Mario agree to two conditions – they can’t use guns, and they have to go after the jeweler's well-protected vault instead of the merchandise in the window.  Their pilfering plan is rounded out by the addition of a safecracker from Milan named Cesar (played by Dassin under the pseudonym Perlo Vita).

The four men meticulously case the joint, detailing everything from the hours of operation of each surrounding business to the lap time around the block.  There’s a great scene where they acquire a duplicate of the jeweler’s state-of-the-art alarm system, causing one of the men to observe that “It’s getting harder to make a living” before methodically testing the alarm like a Consumer Reports scientist.

All of the preparation is merely a set-up for what is probably the best on-screen robbery ever filmed.  Using rope, an umbrella and some simple tools, the burglary takes nearly 30 maddening, nail-biting minutes to unfold, accentuated by a complete lack of dialogue and score.  The half-hour heist is so detailed, it was actually banned in several countries when Rififi was first released.

Rififi is pretty violent for a 45-year-old film, but most of the brutal stuff takes place just off-camera (like the ear-severing scene in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs).  Dassin (Never on Sunday), who wrote the screenplay in six days, does a fantastic job of directing, and the film’s newly restored black-and-white photography looks as lush as ever.  Rififi is based on Auguste Le Breton’s novel and features a performance by La Dolce Vita’s Magali Noël, who sings “Rififi,” a song about physical confrontation in Grutter’s nightclub.

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