Sam, thanks … I like Dassin as well; this film constituted my first introduction to his work.

Noteworthy also are the final desperate scenes with the dying Tony’s car careening on the streets of Paris as he desperately tries to get the kidnapped kid back to his mother. The last scene is truly evocative: the mother with the returned child in her arms looks at the dead Tony in the car with stony disaffection, then turns and enters her home. She is a peripheral character, but earlier in the movie she has the best line in the film. In her anger and angst at her young son’s kidnapping, she calmly confronts her hood husband with these words:

“There are kids… millions of kids who have grown up poor. Like you. How did it happen… What was the difference between you and them that you became a hood, a tough guy, and not them? Know what I think Jo, they’re the tough guys, not you.”

Worth noting too is the evocative and hip jazz score.

Some of these comments are from my review of the film on my blog.

I think it’s that Dassin doesn’t just demonstrate how a person is but why as well. Throughout the film, he informs us — sometimes quite subtly, but never with a ball-peen hammer — about the background of his hard men, so that by the time push comes to shove, we are ready to see it for the tragedy that it is.

I particularly like how you brought history into the picture. It informs all classic movie reviews, but especially so with Dassin.

What gets me about this movie (and perhaps myself) is how Tony could be so brutal in the scene you mention, yet by the end of the film I’m hurting for his failure.

In any language, Dassin seemed to have a knack for directing actors playing bad people so that you could sympathize with them.

Alexander, folks who can’t read subtitles can understand at least a quarter of this film. And thanks for the compliment.

Rififi is about as good a film as any to use to get people into foreign language films, since, in contrast to most films, there’s so little foreign language, haha.