By the night of the heist, our crew is mute. No score, no words, all business. Seeing cinema change before your eyes is akin to traveling back in time and discovering fire. There’s no tense shoot-out with police as the heist goes south. There’s no back-and-forth yammering when something doesn’t line up the way it was supposed to. For thirty minutes, we’re enmeshed with four of the finest criminals on-screen or off, and watching them work plays out like a dance.
Dassin mirrors this in a small moment earlier in the film, a single shot of César’s nightclub songstress girlfriend, Viviane (Magali Noël), rehearsing, slowly pulling back as the band sets up around her, every member moving in time like Tony’s crew. Many highlight Viviane’s earlier performance, one wherein she sings the title song in a knockout number, but for me it’s this little bit of visual storytelling that threads Rififi together. The art of theft is a musical number. These four men have rehearsed every beat. Come showtime, they know the notes forward and back.
Spoilers for ‘Rififi’, ‘Heat‘, ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ follow in the rest of this article.
Dassin’s staunch left-leanings would never allow a violent misogynist like Tony to get away with it, though. That’s where he left one final point of inspiration for all who followed. Scumbag cinema so rarely allows for a happy ending. Dassin has respect for these men, no doubt. Quiet men of code digging through the ceiling of poverty, seizing from the rich—how could you not admire that? This life is built on poisoned ground, however, and the universe will always collect. Tony, as respectable as he is, can’t come back from his vicious treatment of Mado. The men he’s roped in with all succumb to the sin of knowing him.
