Dassin, Jules

DASSIN, JULES (1911-2008). The most prominent Hollywood Blacklist victim, along with Joseph Losey, to direct films from abroad, Dassin made the unique choice of Greece and the ancient themes of its classical theater. By the end of his long life, he had become one of the most acclaimed directors of the blacklist era.

Julius “Jules” Dassin was born in Middleton, Connecticut to Jewish parents. He grew up in Harlem before population shifts had rendered it mostly Black and Latino and attended Camp Kinderland as a youth. Interested in theater from an early age, he joined ARTEF, the militant leftwing and proletarian Yiddish theater group that embraced the experiences of the working-class Jewish community. By the time ARTEF closed in 1941, Dassin had broadened his directing experience to include Jewish summer camps and Group Theater. It was not the typical preparation for a Hollywood auteur.

In his own estimation, the earliest films given him to direct were less than mediocre. Brute Force (1947), a New Deal prison film with anti-authoritarian themes, including prisoners willing to change their own lives as they seek to escape. The Naked City (1948) offered a stunning score and cinematography of Lower Manhattan, keying on a proletarian district destined for oblivion and a routine crime story. After Thieves’ Highway (1949), an intriguing film of crime and California blue-collar life after World War II, Dassin was struck down by the Blacklist. He fled.

Rififi (1955), made in France, was a cinematic landmark, a caper film built around an innovative sequence of the crime filmed over twenty minutes in near-absolute silence. It was the first film to be shown in the United States containing a credit for a blacklisted director and welcomed with a red-baiting attack in the US press. (Influential critic Pauline Kael insisted that only a gangster would want to make such a film. Other attacks followed.)

Dassin’s life changed definitively with his relationship with Melina Mercouri, the most famous Greek actress. Never on Sunday (1960) was a phenomenal hit internationally, as if the world had been awaiting a “happy hooker” saga with a happy ending. Interest in Greek tourism exploded, with Americans in particular eager to see the country first hand. Dassin and Mercouri married in 1966. Phaedra (1967) rehearses the Greek tale by setting it in modern times, with a cruel capitalist fleet owner, indifferent to the fate of the working class amid a great shipwreck, pitted against a bored, wealthy wife who throws her life away on a young lover.

Influenced by the political currents of the 1960s, Dassin made two very radical films destined, at least in the short run, for obscurity. The first was The Rehearsal (1973), a fictional re-enactment of the fascist takeover of Greece several years earlier, with students giving their lives for democracy. By the time the film was ready for distribution, the junta had fallen and interest in the subject with it. The second, Up Tight (1968) about black rebellion in the United States, fell apart amidst production during the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dassin was, as he admitted, late, and by this time a confirmed exile.

Dream of Passion (1978), with an authentic Greek chorus vocalizing the dialect of antiquity, was intended to be an update of “Medea.” Neither Ellen Burstyn’s performance nor the production values could equal the task of bringing theater to film, but it was a magnificent effort. After another minor film, Dassin resigned himself to the stage and retirement. He never lost his deep American identity or his resentment that he had been deprived of making films in the country of his birth.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood. New York: The New Press, 2002.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martins, 1997.