Dassin as Fashion

Commissioned but not published by a Europeanfilm festival and collection in early 2026.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

There isn’t an entry for Jules Dassin in Richard Roud’s two-volume, 1121-page Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980), and criticism of his work in other Anglo-American publications has been sparse. That he was unfashionable in many cinephile circles for most of his career can be attributed to several factors, which this essay will attempt to explore. Foremost among them is his having been blacklisted in Hollywood and moving to Europe in the mid-1950s, thus splitting his filmography into two—a fate that made John Berry and Cy Endfield virtually invisible and Dassin—far more visible due to such European hits as Rififi and Never on Sunday—widely resented. Only Joseph Losey managed to attain over time both visibility and critical respect, thanks in part to the prestige of his frequent screenwriter Harold Pinter and many of his actors.

The question of what makes an artist fashionable or unfashionable—such as what led to Andy Warhol being praised for doing some of the same things that
Frank Tashlin was condemned for—is far from a simple matter, but it is always inflected by both ideological
climates and marketplace practices. And the Cold War’s impact on Dassin’s artistic profile can’t be
overestimated. Read more