Rating: 
Summary: An absolutely stunning movie
Review: This is a movie of the highest rank. It is a caper movie but it is far more. It is a movie that creates real characters with true human motivations. The plot has a sense of veracity and inevitability that only the greatest fiction can aspire to. The plot evolves out of the motivations of its characters. The characters are three dinensional with internal contradictions that only make them more real. The crime itself and its unravelling come faithfully from their motivations. It is not just a crime movie although it is a crime movie of the highest order.
Rating: 
Summary: Dassin's best film along with Thieves Highway
Review: This is hands-down the best crime film ever made; not because it has the maybe the best heist scene ever (30 minutes of no dialogue), but because of the utter realism of the main characters and the performance of the actors (especially the magnificent Jean Servais, working for peanuts, because he had a bit of a drinking problem at the time, according to Dassin) nailing the total 'amoral modus operandi to immoral function' that makes criminals so endlessly fascinating as archetypes of what goes on in less extreme form and under more hypocritical guise throughout society all the time. The Criterion DVD is not perfect, some very annoying lines are visible in a couple of chapters, but image depth & detail is as good as any DVD from this period. It's odd that this huge hit & Quentin Tarantino favorite (several things in "Reservoir Dogs" are direct modifications of things in "Rififi") has been unavailable in any decent home-viewing form for so many years (I've been watching awful video copies for years and very few video stores carried those). The quality of the picture is especially important in this film because the carefully picked neighborhoods in Paris and the other locations outside it where the film was shot are a key ingredient and they literally push it beyond the level of Jacques Becker's classic 1953 film "Touchez Pas Au Grisbi" (Honor Among Thieves) starring French macho icon Jean Gabin, which lacks enough location shooing, and inspired Dassin's film in more ways than one (especially since Becker was a friend of Dassin's who went to bat for him in France during the five years he was unemployed in Europe when the long arm of the Hollywood blacklist prevented him from even working over there by refusing to distribute his films in the states). To shoot any film that's supposed to be realistic and not working on a fantastic level like "Singin in the Rain" or "The Red Shoes" in the studio is to cheapen it irreparably 98 out of a 100 times. Authentic, wordlessly expressive neighborhoods are part and parcel of a 'real' atmosphere and they put it in context. Dassin got paid very little by the producer of the film who was basically taking advantage of his dire straits to get a cheap director. However, he had asked for a percentage of the gross in his contract, which the producer gave up thinking it would come to nothing anyway. A year later the film was a HUGE HIT and even eventually got distributed in both dubbed and subtitled versionS in the States, and those points made Dassin a lot of money and independent of the blacklist. The film was popular enough to have a hilarious parody of it made by Mario Monicelli called "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (also on Criterion) starring Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, etc. Dassin himself made a parody to even greater international success with the fantastic and endlessly immitated "Topkapi" starring Maximillian Schell, Peter Ustinov, and his wife Melina Mercouri (John Woo and Brian De Palma need to come up with a few new original ideas of their own). Above and beyond the great film itself, Criterion has included a 30 minute Dassin interview that's maybe the best short interview with a famous Director I've ever seen. At nearly 90 years of age, the guy's still going strong, and tells one great fascinating story after another, stuff more edifying than any 'audio commentary' (who the hell invented that waste of time anyway?) nonsense ever is. Even though his career was nearly ruined by guys like Kazan and Robert Rossen who decided to 'patriotically' rat on some of these comm[unist] rats that they were sick of seeing weild power in the arts, he makes it obvious by the way he talks about them, that he doesn't bear a grudge against them for almost forcing him to flip burgers for a living, and that he knows the real culprits were the studio heads and politicians who started that witch-hunt business in the first place. ... He did hold a grudge in 1955 though when he himself played the Italian safe-cracker character in "Rififi" who gets shot by Jean Servais after he delivers the immortal line "You know Macaroni...I liked you...but you know what the rules are."
Rating:
Summary: Oh ! the sound !
Review: This is not a review, but rather a word or two about the terrible problems with the sound synchronisation.
The film itself is one of the greats in the genre of crime thriller, and so it is a criminal shame that Criterion have released the film with a French soundtrack well and truly out of synch with the action.
However - there are NO, repeat, NO - such problems with the English language (dubbed) soundtrack !
So - you have the choice of either suffering the sound problems (but getting the original language and thus a better psychological ambience) or suffering the dubbed English (but having the sound effects in synch).
Either way, if you are a devotee of films, or just heist movies, this is a Must-Have !
The DVD would score five stars if Criterion ever get around to releasing it with the sound problems fixed...
Rating:
Summary: a great film. many exciting scenes!
Review: This review is for the Criterion COllection DVD edition of the film.
The film's original French title is "Du Rifiif Chez les Hommes" which translates to "Trouble with the Men"
The film is really good and is about several men who plot to break into a jewelery store, crack open the safe, and escape- all without setting off the alarm.
Several of the scenes have been imitated in other films: notably Mission Impossible and the remake of the Italain Job. Many scenes are quite exciting and the break-in scene is very exciting. This half-hour scene also contains no dialogue making it one of the longest if not the longest elapsed time without dialogue in a film with dialogue.
This is definately one of the best break-in films which I have seen and is certainly worthy of a Criterion Collection release.
There are also several special features. There is a theatrical trailer, Production stills and notes, a video interview with the Director, Jules Dassin, who also personally apporved this edition, and drawings of the sets by Alexandre Trauner.
There is also an optional English language soundtrack for those bothered by foreign language with subitles.
Either way, this is a film that no fan of heist films should miss!
Rating:
Summary: The best french film noir in the fifties
Review: Who can doubt the huge contribution that USA gave the world with films as Witness for prosecution, Pick up on South Sreet , Asphalt jungle or the Killing in this creative decade?
But what Rififi has in its content is much more. The famous mude fifteen minutes became a discrete but original tribute to the glorius mude films.
To be true, I have to name Bob le flambeur as another strong candidate among the best exponents of the french film noir. It's very close to Rififi about it respects to its freshness and another virtues.
Jules Dassin also directed the Naked city, but I'd rather prefer Rififi.
Buy this DVD sooner as you can and don't forget the fact that the new wave will burn three years after. And between you and me, Rififi would be a close ancestor of that important french movement. Don't you?
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