Background
DASSIN, Jules was born on December 18, 1911 in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. Son of Samuel and Berthe (nee Vogel) Dassin.
DASSIN, Jules was born on December 18, 1911 in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. Son of Samuel and Berthe (nee Vogel) Dassin.
Assistant Director to Alfred Hitchcock 1940. Films directed in United States include Brute Force 1947, Naked City 1948, Thieves’ Highway 1949. Settled in France 1954 and directed Rififi (also acted) 1954, Celui qui doit mourir 1956, Never on Sunday (also acted) 1960, Phaedra 1961, Topkapi 1963, 10.30 p.m.
The gap in Dassin’s career during the early 1950s followed his departure from America for political reasons. But in Europe he found Melina Mercouri instead. Together, they made some of the most entertainingly bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drunk. He Who Must Die, Phaedra, and 10:30 p.m. Summer might cure would-be suicides. There are those who found Never on Sunday charming. Topkapi is incoherent, while Mercouri is about as inviting as Medusa. Dassin is an unashamed gimmick director—thus his implausible European films and the irrelevant exercise in silence.
It follows that the “realism " of his postwar films in America was equally peripheral. Certainly one could not think it characteristic of the maker of Reunion in France, an espionage story of blithe absurdity. But Bmte Force is striking; Naked City still looks an innovation in its use of location and the sly glamorizing of a policeman’s day; Thieves’ Highway is a robust, conventional thriller; while Night and the City—Dassin’s best film—does show a London neglected by British directors. In those years, at least, Dassin made movies that were enjoyable because of modest, fulfilled intentions. The pleasure later came only from the grand distortion implicit in the scheme.
Factual account does not really seem appropriate, but in the mid-1930s Dassin studied drama in Europe, and in 1936 he was acting with the Yiddish Theatre and then the Group Theater (be appears, rather helplessly, as an actor in Thieves' Highway, Riff, and Never on Sunday).
He wrote for radio and directed for the stage before serving a director’s apprenticeship making shorts on famous people (Rubinstein, Casals, etc.) at MGM. He was also an assistant on They Knew What They Wanted (40, Carson Kanin) and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (41, Alfred Hitchcock). Survival! was a tribute to Zionism, and Promise at Dawn an adaptation of Romain Gary’s memoir of his mother, with Mercouri as Mom.
Married Beatrice Launer, 1933 (divorced 1962). Children: Joseph(deceased), Richelle, Julie. Married Melina Mercouri, May 18, 1966 (deceased March 6, 1994).