Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Out of prison after a five-year stretch, jewel thief Tony turns down a quick job his friend Jo offers him, until he discovers that his old girlfriend Mado has become the lover of local gangster Pierre Grutter during Tony's absence. Expanding a minor smash-and-grab into a full-scale jewel heist, Tony and his crew appear to get away clean, but their actions after the job is completed threaten the lives of everyone involved.
Rififi is a landmark crime film whose 28-minute near-silent heist sequence remains one of cinema's great set pieces, executed with surgical precision and zero music. The plot is a model of noir economy — setup, execution, and brutal consequence — with the post-heist unraveling feeling genuinely inevitable rather than contrived. Cinematography by Philippe Agostini is expressionist black-and-white at its finest, using shadow and Parisian geography with exceptional craft. Novelty is high: Jules Dassin essentially invented the modern procedural heist film here, and its influence on everything from Topkapi to Heat is undeniable — a truly singular work. Acting is solid but uneven; Dassin himself is charismatic as Cesar, but some supporting performances are merely functional. The ending is effectively bleak and thematically consistent with noir fatalism but stops just short of transcendent — Tony's final drive is iconic yet the surrounding resolution feels slightly abrupt.