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. His boast at Cannes that He Who Must
Die (1957) was his first film made with absolute freedom (1) arguably bore some relation to both its success at many American arthouses and the contempt with which it was received by several critics. The film’s message is that if Christ returned to Earth he would be recrucified, but it still becomes necessary to fight for justice. In Crete in 1921, Greek villagers ruled by decadent Turks are being cast in their annual passion play, and when other persecuted Greeks ask to join the village, they’re rejected by the despots but
embraced by most of the actors, who assume their assigned roles as Jesus and his disciples.
This essay, rather than attempt to determine whether the film’s harsher critics were “right” or “wrong”,
presupposes that any such verdict would derive in part from our own historical situation and placements. And
because it’s obviously easier to define and evaluate Cold War opinions than those of 2026, I’ve included my original responses to that film and to the earlier
earlier Thieves’ Highway (1949), mostly without attempting to update them.
Dassin’s profile was further complicated by his having started out in theater and radio before becoming a film director and having already spent three years in the
mid-30s “studying drama technique” in ten European countries (according to Wikipedia). Such factors clearly splintered his public identity, as did his straddling both mainstream crowd-pleasers and stylistically ambitious art films in both Hollywood and Europe. But the ravages of the Cold War made American Communists into figures that many American and French critics didn’t take seriously, equally unwelcome as martyrs, ideologues, and/or pariahs.
Let me start with two influential American pans Dassin received in the early 1960s, both originally published in small-circulation film magazines and coming from critics who frequently defined themselves in opposition to one another:
Pauline Kael in Film Quarterly:
“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. I have premonitions of the beginning of the end when a man who seems charming or at least remotely possible starts talking about movies.
When he says, ‘I saw a great picture a couple years ago — I wonder what you thought of it?’ I start looking for the nearest exit. His great picture generally turns out to be He Who Must Die or something else that I detested—frequently a socially conscious problem picture of the Stanley Kramer variety. Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness).”(1)
Andrew Sarris in Film Culture:
"Confronting a career that verges on the grotesque, one might say that it is easier
to drive a director out of Hollywood than to drive Hollywood out of a director, Dassin’s softheaded social consciousness has never
obscured his minor talent. After the lumpy proletarianism of He Who Must Die, the
ludicrous escapades of Never on Sunday and
Phaedra seem more appropriate to the
director of Brute Force and Night and the City.
…Dassin remains a lively director in a minor
key, and it is difficult to understand today why
anything more was ever expected of him. […](3)For the record, Kael’s rant introduces her hostile rteview of West Side Story, although the true focus of her scorn appears to be “boobs on the make…with
their contempt for all seriousness” more than Dassin — even though she also slams Never on Sunday along with Black Orpheus one paragraph later as the likely
favorites of “status-seeking” truckdrivers. (It seems that her opinion of Thieves’ Highway, a thriller about truckdrivers, was unrecorded.)
Speaking as someone who was moved and impressed by He Who Must Die when I first saw it as a teenager—
to the point where I also wanted to read Nikos Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified aka The Greek Passion, the novel it was based on (though I never did) — I was both shocked and amused by Kael’s
dismissal without considering it a serious appraisal, unlike Sarris’s thoughtful entry in his far more influential “The American Cinema”. His full entry on Dassin, only excerpted here, appeared in a section
labeled “Strained Seriousness”, further implying that Dassin was fine as long as he stayed away from politics and “serious” art.
Kael’s implied reduction of He Who Must Die to the aesthetic level of a content-oriented Stanley Kramer feature struck me even then as wrong, long before I
discovered that its cinematographer was Jacques Natteau, who also shot Jean Genet’s only film, the silent and poetic Un chant d’amour (1950). Sarris’s more defensible critique, however, seems
automatically to equate “lumpy” with “proletarianism” (like Kael’s snobbish linking of Never on Sunday with
truckdrivers), suggesting that “softheaded” and “social
“consciousness” similarly belonged together like ham and eggs.
Even so, the combined effect of his and Kael’s
treatment of Dassin ultimately led me to question my
initial respect for He Who Must Die—which actually
as much to do with its use of CinemaScope and its
handling of crowds as with its social conscience. Yet
when I saw it again years later, it still carried power
and conviction in spite of its allegorical pretensions and excesses. Had I been brainwashed?
Truthfully, it’s hard to think of anyone who wasn’t
brainwashed to some extent by the hysteria of the
Cold War. And after I saw Dassin’s Never on Sunday in
1960 American who wants to educate her (played by
Dassin, who also wrote the script), my interest in following his work virtually evaporated. This broad comedy hit is about a Greek prostitute with a heart of gold (Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s partner, who’d played a similar role in He Who Must Die), confronted by a square, uptight American who wants to educate her
(played by Dassin, who also scripted).
Those suspecting that French critics might have been
more tolerant of Dassin than Kael and Sarris should
consider the following:
François Truffaut in Arts:
The bottom line is that Dassin is American and that many Americans are children at heart. Just like children, they have more spirit, imagination, and intuition than adults, which is why Hollywood cinema is so much more vibrant than ours. But when children try to imitate adults, while you can get Mozart, you can also get Minou Drouet [a celebrated child poet and musician of dubious talent]! When Americans (with the exception of Faulkner) try to ‘rethink’ the world, they lean naturally toward the left, and left-wing Americans are the most childish of all. (4)
Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma):
Jules Dassin wasn’t at all bad when he was shooting documentary-style among the Italian fruit-workers of San Francisco, in the old wooden subway of New York, or on the dreamy docks of […] London. But one day, alas, our Jules began to take himself seriously, and came to France with a martyr’s passport. […] If Billy Graham were a filmmaker, he would doubtless be called Jules Dassin. Letting our apprentice philosopher preach from European studios is rather like letting a fairground strong-man think he is capable of explaining Aristotle. After Celui qui doit mourir and its attempt to prove his position by aqua-fortis engraving, comes La Loi and engraving in rose-water. (5)
Although Sarris, who read these critics in French,
might have been influenced by their positions, it
seems safer to argue that they shared the same
anti-left bias. Indeed, Truffaut’s argument about
the vibrancy of Hollywood over French cinema closely
matches Sarris’s opening sentence. And Truffaut and
Godard may have been further incensed by Dassin as
a cultural usurper, having made a big-budget film
about Greeks and Turks in French that represented
France in Cannes. (In this same Cannes report,
Truffaut wrote that this film influenced by Eisenstein
and Pudovkin lacked any image with the grandeur of a
shot in André Malraux’s L’éspoir.) Even Jacques Rivette’s fictional and quasi-sympathetic blacklist victim in Paris nous appartient (1981) was depicted as
somewhat deranged, making it impossible to distinguish fully his persecution from his paranoia.
Thieves’ Highway, while never being unfashionable, had to await its rediscovery as a film noir by Ramond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their pioneering
Panorama du film noir américain 1941-1953 (1955), essentially inventing a new genre and marketing tool
on the basis of several Hollywood thrillers belatedly
arriving in France after World War 2. Because the
French definition of “noir” was both literary–deriving
from Gallimard’s black-jacketed Série noire
translations of American crime novels—and related to
Surrealism, with the guiltless celebrations of cruelty
and perversion that this taste sometimes entailed, it
was received differently than the Anglo-American
versions derived from it. For Borde and Chaumeton, Dassin’s thriller
may pass for a documentary about the fruit and vegetable trade in a big American city….But there are also a few noir details: a settling of scores , some killers, a hand smashed with an ax handle, an ambivalent heroine who amorously rakes her nails down the naked torso of the man she’s meant to betray. And these touches seem a little too insistent to be inspired by a realist ambition alone. It’s films of this kind that we were thinking of when we proposed the hypothesis that Hollywood production arbitrarily noirifies social statements. (6)
In short, contrary to the sociopolitical aspects of
noir traced by James Naremore and Imogen Sara
Smith, among others, noir was attractive insofar as it
was apolitical. This wasn’t my own response when I
first saw Thieves’ Highway circa the late 60s, but my
take was confused: I was impressed by the film’s
seeming influence on On the Waterfront for its
exposure of corruption (ignoring Waterfront’s implied
support of the blacklist), its location shooting, and its
nasty boss played by Lee J. Cobb (another friendly
witness, like Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg).
When Dassin was interviewed in 1955 by Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (7), who described him then as “a simple and cultivated man, exceedingly warm,” they were likely charmed by the fact that he’d started out in Hollywood as an assistant to Hitchcock. But they might have raised their eyebrows when Dassin described his second feature, a domestic comedy called The Affairs of Martha (1942), as his best film, expressing mostly dissatisfaction with most of the others apart from Night and the City.
Regarding Thieves’ Highway, he had hoped it would have had more documentary elements. But the film’s talented screenwriter, A.I. Bezzerides, who adapted his own novel, based on his own and his father’s experiences as truckers, objected to both studio-enforced changes in the plot (chiefly the hero’s father losing a leg rather than being killed before the action begins) and the replacement of Shelley Winters by Cortese.
Thom Andersen’s influential 1985 essay “Red Hollywood” (8) treats Thieves’ Highway and several other Dassin thrillers as social statements belonging to a subgenre he calls “film gris”. And the seeming conflict between Borde and Chaumenton’s noir and
Anderssen’s gris, like the incompatibility between
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sadomasochism and his
leftism, may help to account for the discomfort
created by Dassin’s sensibility that made him
unfashionable once he became a European
filmmaker.
End Notes
- Truffaut, François, Chroniques d’Arts Spectacles 1954-1958, Paris: Gallimard,
2019, 353. - Kael, Pauline, I Lost It At the Movies, New
York: Bantam, 1965, 127. - Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968,
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968, 191. - Prime, Rebecca, Hollywood Exiles in Europe:
The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture,
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2014, 135.
. - Godard, Jean-Luc, Godard on Godard, translated
and edited by Tom Milne, New York: Da Capo,
1972, 127. - Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton, A
Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953,
translated by Paul Hammond, San Francisco,
CA: City Lights Books, 2002, 117.
788. - “Entretien avec Jules Dassin (1),” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 46, avril 1955, 3-13.
- Andersen, Thom, “Red Hollywood” and “Afterword,” in “Un-American” Hollywood:
Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 225-275.