jules dassin criterion

 

But maybe it was more fun having to do all the detective work. Jules Dassin died earlier this week at the age of 96. New York is vital, even during the pandemic. Walkers in the City: Jules Dassin and Bruce Goldstein in New York It was a Jewish neighborhood at that time, also an Italian neighborhood. Both had lived a long, long time, but it doesn't quell the suspicion that the world is cruel and indifferent after all. Left to right: script supervisor Mary Chaffey, technical advisor Capt. He knew he would. Yes, that’s when I became friends with him. With his debut short film, Zoo, now on the Criterion Channel, the Montreal-based filmmaker talks with us about its depiction of police brutality and independent cinema’s engagement with social issues. It’s not the one we remember and we’re nostalgic for, and maybe not in the same neighborhoods. Goldstein’s record as founder of the reissue distributor Rialto Pictures and repertory program director of New York’s Film Forum reflects his city’s wry, eclectic sensibility as well as his own. William Hohauser and I have been working together for about fifteen years. Dee had a hand in the process of finding the actors, and she got the local community involved. Toward the end of it, we see Dee, in her early twenties, stepping out from behind a curtain as her post-synced voice asks for “your dimes and dollars” and the narrator explains: “This is the place where the people’s talent will train for the task to interpret the people’s struggle.”. Jules Dassin Quick Shop Night and the City Jules Dassin Quick Shop Rififi Jules Dassin Quick Shop Thieves’ Highway Jules Dassin Quick Shop Breaking the Rules. New York magazine used to have reader competitions in the back. Following the end of World War II, Dee, recently divorced, met Ossie Davis while working on a play. Plus, TOM MIX in ‘No Man’s Gold.’” It’s my favorite artifact. Free shipping. In fact, in comparison to the previous Criterion DVD, the supplements here are a downgrade. We’re of an age when we can just remember the tail end of the candy store. ., and on a second line, PICKLE PR . That’s all right. And he knows everything about the subway. Criterion's original DVD edition for Jules Dassin's Brute Force presents the film in the aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on a dual-layer disc.The standard-definition encode was sourced from a high-definition restoration, scanned from a 35mm fine-grain composite print. The winner said, “Put more vending machines in the subway that don’t work.”. … Out now on Criterion: http://www.criterion.com/films/654-rififi New York you can walk for hours and the cityscape keeps changing. Still, when we catch a glimpse of the old Penn Station in Uncovering “The Naked City,” or see the promenade and approach to the Williamsburg Bridge replaced by an impersonal superstructure, we do mourn a loss of character. I was living not far away, on Elizabeth Street, where Scorsese grew up, which at one time was a Sicilian neighborhood. Could you take me through the process of nailing down the locations? He rarely talked publicly about his boyhood in East Harlem. When I first met him, I was expecting a decrepit old man, because he kept saying on the phone, “Well, you know I’m really, really old now, eighty-nine.” So at JFK we were on the lookout for the oldest man possible coming off the Olympic Airways flight from Athens and then we see this impeccably dressed man with a spring in his step, who turned out to be Dassin. One masked guy whizzes by on a bicycle,” Goldstein notes, in an email. Like Dassin, Goldstein is a walker in the city, savoring the gusto of its streets and scanning every building in his path for untold history or fresh life. You can’t kill the creativity. When we’re editing, we think alike. No classic film noir sports a more quintessentially noir-ish title than Night And The City. And two, Jules was the world’s number-one Garbo fan. The Greeks adored him. His longtime friend celebrates the enduring legacy of his filmmaking, his ideas, and his advocacy of underappreciated artists. I have a fax in which he tells me exactly where he lived as a boy on 105th Street; he remembered the number of the building. We had a lot of fun making this film. Did he express any positive feeling about the film when you were with him? “If you look quick, you can see one or two people with masks. Frank Silvera, in the role of an integrationist promoting a nonviolent ideology, was an alumnus of the American Negro Theatre and a founder of the “American Theatre of Being,” an integrated Los Angeles acting conservatory that supported the advancement of Black performers and fought against stereotypical roles. Then I went and looked at the Monday ads, and sure enough, the films mentioned in the Daily Worker article were there. Blacklisted American director Jules Dassin's groundbreaking French film noir--with a memorable music- and dialogue-free opening scene--follows four thieves who pull off a heist at a reputedly impenetrable jewelry shop, then watch as their "perfect crime" falls apart before their eyes. French New Wave ... Search Criterion.com. Her legacy is extended by the socially conscious filmmaking of Regina King, Ava DuVernay, and Garrett Bradley, to name only three notable contemporary directors, and it is pictured in Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental short film An Ecstatic Experience (2015). Broadway columnist turned producer Mark Hellinger (The Killers) bought Wald’s script (then called, simply, Homicide), took credit for the concept, and embraced it. But we did find 167 Rivington, and sure enough you could just make out the words “Hop Lee Laundry.” We went back to the frame—and there it was. Thankfully they at least carried over the wonderful interview with Jules Dassin that Criterion recorded in 2000. At Katz’s Delicatessen, there’s always been a person who hands you a ticket as you go in. The details on the mechanics of Dassin’s production—cinematographer William Daniels devised hidden cameras and simple, compact lighting rigs that enabled him to shoot anywhere, anytime—should be inspirational for film students and for audiences hungry for reality-based movie magic. Other parts of The Naked City, like Rivington Street and Stanton Street and Essex Street, where they filmed key scenes, look pretty much the same today. When I visited him in Athens, he had a shelf of all her films on VHS, every single one of them. (Uncertified in origin, but likely produced by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration circa 1945, the film was found in the Anthology Film Archives collection and preserved in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017.) The Oscar-nominated director of Another Round tells us why Ingmar Bergman has always been a cinematic role model for him and what he learned from the Swedish auteur’s approach to capturing human behavior. You can’t be certain, but I can imagine him saying, “Let’s have an ice man, let’s have a milkman with the horse cart.” Jules once told me his favorite song was “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” It was published in 1919; he would have been eight years old when it came out. He is the author of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, cowinner of the National Award for Arts Writing in 2008, and edited two volumes of James Agee’s prose for the Library of America in 2005. Were there any that jumped out that you didn’t see before? You focus on the unstressed vignettes and visual details that, more than anything else, bring Jules’s movie to life. Jules Dassin's Night and the City opens with cheap grifter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) running for his life through the streets of London. Dezember 1911 in Middletown, Connecticut; 31. (No one knows who added The.) He wrote and coproduced the 2019 documentary Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers. Home › Recommendation › Films To Watch › Observe the birth of the modern police procedural in Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City,” restored via the Criterion Collection. Zu seinen bekanntesten Filmen zählen Rififi und Sonntags nie! Dassin first opens with a great story about being recruited to play in a studio baseball game (Fox vs. MGM) and then talks about the … The pilots invited me into the cockpit for a smoke.” That’s how much the Greeks worshipped him. Criterion’s transfer of Jules Dassin’s funereal noir masterpiece is as grimly dazzling as a procession of buffed-and-polished hearses. JULES DASSIN – "The Naked City," "Brute Force," "Never On Sunday" – was on the lam by 1950. When he admits to betraying Johnny, she violently attacks him but later nurses his wounds and tries to console him one last time. Life Meets Art in Uptight, Ruby Dee’s Groundbreaking Collaboration with Jules Dassin. Dassin had just returned to the U.S. from Paris, where he was living in exile after also being blacklisted, and wanted Davis to collaborate with him on it. But if you go up to East Harlem, Mott Haven in the Bronx, or Williamsburg, these are still old New York City neighborhoods. Almost like divine intervention. After starring in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, she had been frustrated with being typecast as what scholar Donald Bogle would later call “the Negro June Allyson”—the perfect wife or girlfriend to a leading man. Yeah, and not only in memory of them—I feel it is both their memories. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin and newspaperman-cum-producer Mark Hellinger’s dazzling police procedural, The Naked City, was shot on location in New York. With the releases of Thief and Rififi, The Criterion Collection has released two classics of the crime/film noir genre. He would have known all those places on the street, all those businesses—Kobre’s Haberdashery, and of course, Ratner’s [Dairy Restaurant] across the street. This is followed by color footage of the aftermath of King’s assassination, which occurred after Dassin had finished most of the shooting for the film. Ina Archer is a visual artist, filmmaker, and programmer whose work examines the intersections of race and ethnicity, representation, and technology. I think the real reasons Jules pushed Daniels on Hellinger were, one, he had worked with him before [on The Canterville Ghost and Brute Force] and loved him. She also worked to bring authenticity to the language and the events portrayed. It became more of a Lotto kind of place, but it did do the egg creams and sodas, and couldn’t survive COVID-19. Max Julien was classically trained, had cowritten Cleopatra Jones, and would go on to star in The Mack. My eye had been drawn to “J. It’s extraordinary what Daniels did with the lighting. We could check every address that we could make out. They were also lunch counters, and you could have a cheap hamburger or whatever. I just found out that George Burns grew up around the corner. It’s funny because I had done a presentation on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three at the Egyptian at the TCM Festival, and I mentioned the Chiclets machines that used to be in the subway, because you can see them on the platform in Pelham One Two Three. 1947: Brute Force [Blu-ray] (Criterion Collection) with Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, music by Miklós Rózsa - directed by Jules Dassin REVIEWED ON THIS PAGE 1947: Desert Fury [Blu-ray ] with Lizabeth Scott, John Hodiak, music by Miklós Rózsa - directed by Lewis Allen (rare example of film noir in color) An incendiary adaptation of John Ford’s Pabst-like expressionist film The Informer (1935), Uptight features an all-Black cast and transposes a tale of the Irish Troubles to the era of Black liberation. We used our other great resource. Ratings and Reviews. Greenfie Pickle Pr” across the street. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now playing on the Criterion Channel—becomes an irresistible mash note to the teeming vitality of 1947 New York. He thought Hellinger must have then succumbed to pressure from Universal executives to cut his most pointed juxtapositions of glitz and poverty or middle-class coziness and homelessness. I use the song as a little homage under that montage of the scenes that I think are childhood memories. View Comments . It’s easy for me to imagine the day they shot there—the crew getting there at dawn and grabbing that shot of the street-cleaner truck under the archway, and then, around seven o’clock, before it gets too crowded, doing those shots underground in the subway at Lexington and 110th Street, and then going down seven blocks, to 103rd, to grab the exterior of the rush-hour crowd getting into the subway. Julian Mayfield, like Dassin, had returned from exile, and had a career as an intellectual and pan-Africanist activist. Little things in the movie had to be childhood memories. You can tell he’s in his element. He talked to me a lot about it, and we faxed a lot. It might be the golden age of hip-hop, or something we never heard of. Five or six years ago, you made In the Footsteps of “Speedy,” tracing the path Harold Lloyd took through New York in 1927. As Dee’s career advanced, she and Davis became followers of Paul Robeson, the iconic performer who at that time was the leader of the Pan-Africanist Council on African Affairs, an anticolonialist group fighting segregation. Yeah. Seeing the re-edited film for the first time at the New York premiere, Dassin said, “I walked off in tears.” He couldn’t appreciate that despite the studio-imposed changes to his work, his fearless direction had succeeded in portraying a city (as James Agee wrote in an unsigned review for Time) “bursting with energy, grandeur, sunlight, human variety and an eager journalistic glamor.”. Jules Dassin, with ever-present cigarette in hand, directs some local baleboosteh extras at the Essex Street Mark on the Lower East Side. You don’t have to talk sometimes. She found the work fulfilling and was able to quickly and thoroughly imagine the scenes that Dassin proposed. There’s a shot of him in a sopping wet, sweat-drenched T-shirt, directing some baleboosteh extras at the Essex Street Market. It was the exact time period we needed. You have to look hard, and you have to look up—you don’t see much at street level, because that’s where all the new stores are put in. Get info about new releases, essays and interviews on the Current, Top 10 lists, and sales. In Uncovering “The Naked City,” Goldstein, a friend of Dassin’s in his later years, connects the warmth and vigor beneath the movie’s commonplace storyline to the director’s bond with his hometown. Bill Haley and His Comets’ generation-defining hit “Rock Around the Clock” comes through like a seismic, uncontrollable force in Paweł Pawlikowski’s meticulously crafted romance. He worshipped her. After growing up in Harlem, she began her career with the vibrant, independent American Negro Theatre, led by actor and playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O’Neal, who were intent on building a creative platform for African American self-representation. USC has the production managers’ archives. With movies that spoke urgently to the nation post-independence, the director forged a path between the realist tendencies of the era’s art-house cinema and the pleasures of popular genre filmmaking. William is not only a brilliant editor and coproducer and director of photography, he’s also a real New York aficionado, who lives on the Lower East and grew up here. Did Jules share his recollections about shooting on the Lower East Side? Barry Jenkins Puts a Spotlight on Ruby Dee and Black Power. Penn Station was the wake-up call. By Douglas Davidson on September 6, 2020 • ( 0) Released June 30 th, 1947, Jules Dassin’s (Rififi) Brute Force opened and took audiences and critics by storm. She shows sympathy toward Tank but is also blunt about the risks that he’s taken with the Council. That says everything about the Lower East Side in those days, doesn’t it? It wasn’t just Delancey Street—it was much of the neighborhood directly south. The Academy Film Archive has preserved Jules Dassin's film Night and the City, including the British and pre-release versions. Jules Dassin, eigentlich Julius Dassin[1] (* 18. Dee’s time on-screen is relatively brief—she has only two main scenes—and her performance draws from her experience playing similar kinds of characters. I don’t know how he did it. You know, “My God, that’s Jules!”. When Davis (who was too busy because he was already scheduled to act in The Scalphunters) suggested Dee as a screenwriting partner, she embraced the opportunity and touted her ability to “see more than one side of a subject, to weigh matters and to make choices based on their value in relation to what’s at stake.”. And representing an older generation of Black actors is Juanita Moore, most famous for her turn as the selfless mother in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. The Criterion Collection's 2007 DVD edition of Jules Dassin's The Naked City presents the film in the aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on a dual-layer disc. They know what you want, and you know what they can add to it. I think Jules wanted to shoot part of the film in East Harlem to go back to the old neighborhood. Dee recalls that she spent her work days “sequestered” in Dassin and his wife Melina Mercouri’s apartment, fleshing out scenes that Dassin described to her, then handing him her drafts to review. The film opens with a beautiful painted credit sequence by animators Faith and John Hubley, sketching the bond between Johnny and Tank. 5.0. He was really thrilled to be back in New York. It had been staring at our faces all along, because if you look at the frame carefully, you can just make out “Hop” and then “ee” under a light bulb. You know, Sweet Smell of Success is one of my favorites, but it’s a stylized—fantasized, even—version of the city. Observe the birth of the modern police procedural in Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City,” restored via the Criterion Collection. Write a review. Then you look at it closely, and you say, just wait a minute. Following, Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais), a master thief fresh out of jail, wearing a harried look and suffering ill health he refuses to be … I think he had a good time making it. See all 9 - All listings for this product. We figured out that the laundry was 167 Rivington. The production was very well documented. I think before then, people thought, get rid of the old and do something new—this postwar kind of spirit. He then collaborated on numerous movies with Greek superstar Melina Mercouri, his second wife. There’s no longer such thing as an ice cream parlor either, you know, a place where you can just hang out and eat something without having to take out a second mortgage on your apartment. Walter Matthau’s from the neighborhood and Jerry Stiller grew up right across the street [on Jackson Street] and both went to Seward Park High—as did Julius Rosenberg, I might add. In return, Hellinger paid Weegee a fee that he split with his publisher, and employed the photographer at $100 a week as a “technical adviser” (as Kubrick would on Dr. Strangelove). It was one of the hottest summers on record. And if you have a subscription to the New York Times, you can access any newspaper from 1851 to 2002. His childhood friend Johnny is now a militant revolutionary respected and protected by the community. How hard was it to make this film during the pandemic? You glance at that shot of the Chinese laundry and you think, never in a million years. I mean, it’s like any working relationship, like the one I have with designer Kathleen Gates, who puts the Film Forum calendars together with me. An orphaned film called A People’s Playhouse Presented by the American Negro Theatre shows glimpses of the company at its Harlem location. Her familiarity with these two leaders and her knowledge of their divergent methods would go on to animate Uptight. Directed by Jules Dassin • 1968 • United States. I was trying to think of the earliest feature film actually shot inside the subway (we proved that the one Harold Lloyd used in Speedy twenty years before was a set), and Shane says, Applause [1929]. . In contrast, Uptight focuses directly on revolutionary struggle in theatrical scenes that unfold like tableaux. Also, Edward G. Robinson, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor. I have all these faxes from him, like a hundred, written in this teensy-weensy handwriting. Apart from its scripted narrative, Uptight is notable for its inclusion of other visual elements (and the iconic score, written and performed by Booker T. and the MGs). It’s hard to find specific addresses. And the bill is: “This week: ANITA ROSENTHAL, ONLY ROMANIAN WOMAN DIRECTOR, IN PERSON. Dassin and Hellinger had collaborated on the prison film Brute Force the year before. I wanted his approval of everything we did. It helps to have a high-definition copy of the movie, of course. This came about through Dee and Dassin’s smooth creative partnership, during which the two proved to be very much aligned. The film is set in Cleveland, Ohio (where Dee was born), in the Flats, a declining Black neighborhood skirting the city’s steel mills and industrial infrastructure. Jules must have had that sort of trusting, intuitive relationship with William Daniels, who won an Academy Award for The Naked City but is best known as Greta Garbo’s favorite cameraman. From then on, we were fast friends. He would have gone to Loew’s Delancey, or Loew’s Clinton, or the Palestine Theatre. But I didn’t think much about the neighborhood back then, even though my father grew up there. And we had the tax photos, the 1946 phone book, and the set photos by Weegee and Stanley Kubrick, and production stills shot by Universal’s own photographer. Jules talked to me about playing stickball there. . Wald said the producer considered shelving the project until Dassin convinced him they could master a homegrown neorealism with the help of Albert Maltz, who wrote the shooting script. They were the Starbucks of their day—everywhere! I mean, my father grew up on the Lower East Side, right where the climax of Naked City takes place, and he could have been in one of the huge crowds Jules shot on Delancey Street. The Naked City has been hailed -- and rightfully so -- for effecting a transformation in the nature of crime dramas. In a suite of four sci-fi-inflected short films now playing on the Criterion Channel, the British Ghanaian artist imagines a time in which Africa has ascended to prosperity but continues to grapple with the remnants of its colonial past. Though I haven’t been back since the pandemic. März 2008 in Athen) war ein US-amerikanischer Filmregisseur, Drehbuchautor, Produzent und Schauspieler. Your doc makes the case for The Naked City as a very personal film for Dassin. For instance, how did you track down that Chinese laundry? $50.00. One of the world’s most passionate cinephiles, Bertrand Tavernier, passed away last month. Dee was first introduced to Uptight as a proposal for her husband. In Uptight, she once again assumes that role, but with a steely resolve and emotional vividness that humanizes the film, which is otherwise dominated by its polemical politics and Brechtian aesthetics. I said, “It must have been hard for you—that long flight without a cigarette.” And he said, “No, it was fine. Disappointingly the supplements don’t get any upgrade. A location story in the Daily Worker described Murder on Diamond Row on the marquee at Loew’s Delancey and Charlie Chan in the Trap at the Apollo. He made Uncovering “The Naked City” in the late spring, summer, and fall of 2020. So we had the address. In the words of the producer’s biographer, Jim Bishop, Hellinger knew that the movie “had to be so New Yorkerish that it looked like a documentary.” He renamed it Naked City after Arthur “Weegee” Fellig’s 1945 collection of sensational on-the-spot photography. The politically trenchant Uptight was a natural extension of what Dee had been striving to do since the early days of her career: to combine art with activism.