From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jules Dassin (born Julius Dassin on December 18, 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut) is an American film director. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist.

One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York, but became well-known for his noir films Brute Force, The Naked City and Thieves' Highway in the 1940s. Just as Dassin was about to be brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, producer Darryl F. Zanuck assigned him the screenplay for Night and the City, and sent him to London, to begin production on the film.

In an interview accompanying The Criterion Collection DVD release, Dassin recalls that Zanuck warned him that this would be his final film for Hollywood, advising him to shoot the most expensive scenes first, so that the studio would be "on the hook," and allow him to complete it.

After the film's release, European producers were told that their films would not be allowed to be released in the United States if Dassin were involved in their production. After the release of Night and the City, it would be five years before another film directed by Dassin, now working in France, would be released. During this period he fell into hard times and poverty and took the job largely because he needed work. The resulting film, the French language noir classic Rififi, opened to rave reviews and box-office success, famously regarded by influential French film critic and later director Francois Truffaut as the 'best noir he had ever seen'. The film's legendary 'heist sequence' not present in its source novel was an invention of the director and has since been imitated on countless occasions.

Dassin met and became romantically involved with Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he married. The couple made Pote tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday) in 1960 and its Broadway musical adaptation, Illya Darling, in 1967. The film earned Dassin Academy Award nominations for Best Director and the Best Original Screenplay. Dassin and Mercouri went on to make Topkapi and Phaedra.

Dassin directed Bette Davis in the 1952 Broadway musical revue Two's Company.

His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer until his death in 1980. Jules Dassin's daughter is the actress Julie Dassin.

• Jules Dassin at the Internet Movie Database