A visionary life

JULES DASSIN, the US film-maker, has died in Athens aged 96, leaving a legacy that promoted a new realism in Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) before he was branded a communist.

As a result of this, Dassin was largely unknown in his own land. He didn't return until 1968, when he directed Up Tight, a drama set in the black ghetto of Cleveland and based on Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer.

His status as an un-American also meant his non-inclusion on university syllabuses, a fact that I learnt from a young UCLA graduate in 2001 who had never heard of, never mind seen, Rififi (1955).

That student is a tutor now and tells me that one of the first things that he did was include Rififi as a must-see film. Ironically, I was also to see the film in 2001 at a special screening in Detroit.

Dassin was named as a communist by Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle during the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1949 and was blacklisted immediately.

He never repudiated his communist politics and pursued his career abroad.

North America's loss was our gain. He arrived here in 1950 to make Night and the City, with Richard Widmark playing a small-time hustler who dies in his pursuit of the mythical main chance.

Now considered a landmark in the development of film noir, it was shot against a background of a London smog, heightening the sensation that Widmark's character was trapped within his culture.

You might imagine that Dassin had a sympathy for the little man who couldn't escape his supposed fate.

You'd be right, but Dassin would emphasise that we are capable of changing circumstances.

His style was to take the camera onto the streets, a location technique that allowed him to create a form of realism that smashed the idea of everything being shot on a Hollywood backlot.

Rififi, which was filmed in Paris, relates the story of some double-dealing crooks who decide to rob a jewellery shop. It includes scenes of Parisian life and a 32-minute sequence without music or dialogue.

Such was the accuracy of the execution that the French gendarmes wanted it banned because they feared that it might be used as an instruction manual.

The French new wave was very impressed, with Truffaut declaring it the best noir that he had ever seen. Dassin also inspired tracking shots in films such as Godard's A Bout de Souffle in 1960.

Dassin went on to Greece to make He Who Must Die (1957) - a moralist movie based upon Nicos Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified - and initiated a lifelong love affair with Melina Mercouri, they marrying in 1966.

They produced Never On A Sunday (1960), with him playing the typical, irritating intellectual with geeky glasses trying to save the magnificent tart with a heart. It won an Oscar for the music.

They would go on to collaborate on such films as Phaedra (1962) and then went to Turkey to produce and direct Topkapi, another heist drama, which gained an Oscar for Peter Ustinov.

With the arrival of the colonels' coup in 1967, Dassin and Mercouri moved to Paris, where they continued to support the Greek resistance and especially the Greek Communist Party.

They would return to Athens in triumph in 1974, with Mercouri becoming minister for culture and taking up the cause for the Elgin Marbles to be returned to their rightful place in the Parthenon.

Going on to make Promise of Dawn (1970), A Dream of Paradise (1978) and his last film Circle for Two (1980), Dassin became central to establishing the Thessaloniki international film festival.

I was privileged to meet Dassin and Mercouri at the festival in 1993. He was warm and witty and she still looked magnificent, despite being ravaged by the tobacco habit that took her life in 1994.

My proudest moment was being introduced to him as the critic for the Morning Star. His eyes lit up. He took my hand warmly and turned to the assembled audience and introduced me.

"This man works for the Morning Star, that's the newspaper formally known as the Daily Worker and they were the only press that gave me support when I was blacklisted."

Dassin was born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911 and had three children. Richette is a songwriter and Julie is an actresss. His son Joe was a chanson singer in France until he died in 1980.