"The Fight of Men is the best film noir I've ever seen." -François Truffaut, The Movie of My Life
Who would have thought that Vittorio Gassman and Marcelo Mastroianni, the two male gods, would have The witty play of blind obsession with stealing, and the irony that humans will find ways to screw things up when they have achieved their ideals struck me.
An indescribable sense of urgency drove me to click on Dassin's long-lost noir film "The Fight of Men." Because "Street of Our Lady" is an adaptation of the former.
The core of the two films is the description of how the safe is stolen[1]. The concept of "stealing" in the movie should first appear in John Huston's noir film "The Night Is Not Quiet", and the backbone of the story is recruiting horses and stealing jewelry.
play
Dassin's creativity lies in prolonging the whole process of breaking the safe, and he turns it into a breath-taking episode, nearly half an hour long, without any dialogue or music. This segment is so meticulously constructed, the details are portrayed in such meticulous detail.
Indeed, the music in this clip is unnecessary. All we could hear was taps, gasps, some plaster falling into a pre-positioned umbrella, some muffled coughs, and the screeching screeching of the drill used to open the safe after the siren was blocked Voice.
During this period of time, the actions and actions of the actors become the basic drama, and the specific duration of the characters’ activities replaces the drama time of the story, that is, the content of the film is completely consistent with the actions and actions of the actors. Here those stylized experiences become useless for the actor, pure action becomes the main body of the film, and the actor is completely at the mercy of the director.
Why can't these men speak softly? This probably makes no sense. Then if we romantically regard this silence as a very spiritual choice for Dassin, this treatment strengthens the suspense of the scene, just like teasing the audience off the screen who are also in silence.
The theft scene has another peculiarity, it is only in the subplot within the story development entanglement[2], rather than the climax of the whole film. Such a choice of structure directly clarifies that Dassin's original intention is not just to present a dramatic thrill to the audience, but something else.
The interest shown in "Battle of Men" is more about people, about human nature, about how ambition causes some people to lose their moral sensitivity, when people are blindly obsessed and persistent, ruthless pursuit finally satisfies desire, however, But destroying himself, such a negative irony story.
black temperament
The film abandons the grand narrative and adopts an individualized and private narrative strategy. The protagonist, Tony, is an ex-convict with sad eyes and bulging nodules, who dotes on the godson who is still a little boy. Tony's cruel treatment of his former mistress shows a bad temperament, a character image of a cold-blooded killer. But until the end, he seems to be influenced by the goodwill left in the subconscious and responds to the gangster's revenge as the lone ranger, which gives the film its true soul.
The boy's father is named Joe, a Swedish. Joe and his friend Mario take a fancy to the diamonds in the shop window, want to smash the window before the green light goes on, and then drive away. After listening to Tony, he began to show his transgression of the law. He opposed the plan and suggested to directly steal the diamonds in the store safe. They used a box-breaking expert named Caesar.
Generally speaking, the streets in movies are wet, because they are more photogenic, but Paris in "Men's Fight" is portrayed as particularly wet. In the city of Nuoda, the pavements soaked by the rain reveal a criminal atmosphere, and the only warmth in this screen world comes from an apartment where one of his thieves and his wife and children live. it's here.
The film opens with a back room board game, and after the theft ends, Dassin echoes the opening scene with another shot of a group of men around a table. Notice how he takes a close-up of their eyes before revealing the diamonds. It was fantastic. They complete a perfect crime, yet Caesar gives his girlfriend a ring, after which Caesar's girlfriend takes the place of Tony's mistress, occupying the general sense of what leads the protagonist down a dangerous path." Femme Faerie" location. When Pierre, the owner of the Montmartre nightclub, recognizes it, he guesses the identity of the thieves and sends his men to follow them in search of jewels.
The final third of the film focuses on the kidnapping of Joe's son, who claims he can be returned safely if the jewelry is handed over. Tony missed the mark: the boy was an eyewitness. He looked for boys, questioned bartenders, prostitutes, rascals, and old friends, trying to get a head start. In these scenes, Montmartre appears to be huddled in the pre-dawn moisture.
The Reality of the Screen Environment
Dassin was a unique master of urban landscapes, and in the era of McCarthy's witch hunt, Dassin was classified as a communist and blacklisted in Hollywood. The filming took place in exactly the same locations he surveyed while wandering the town when he was unemployed, and was shot in Paris on a very low budget.
This is a result of the unprecedented realism that some Hollywood films after the war began to embody in sets, lighting and narrative. The trend of live-action shooting during the war, caused by the government's strict budget restrictions on set construction, continued after the war. Dassin was a practitioner of this concept. His previous "City That Never Sleeps" (1948) used a portable pan. Lights Out illuminates the indoor shoot and is known for his semi-documentary take on New York. This is why the film does not show a realistic image style.
In The Fight of Men, Dassin finds the places of everyday life—nightclubs, taverns, and construction sites—and shrouds them in a layer of gray reality. Just before the theft begins, there's a scene that's all the more endearing because of its inconsequentiality: the rambunctious nightclub musicians are warming up and getting better.
The look of realism is also present, a polishing of the most common elements of violence in crime movies, a clumsiness that seems more in line with the real laws of the natural world.
When a cop is found standing next to the car he was using to get away from the theft, Tony jumps out of the shadows to smack him, not treated to the smooth, elegant, exaggerated sound effects commonly used in modern crime movies, but It's the kind of clumsy feeling that a man isn't used to hitting the cops. Also, most of the violence in movies happens off-screen. This may have been determined by the censorship of that era, but a more fitting interpretation of Dassin's intentions would be that the film's focus is on the person who committed the violence, not the violence itself.
[1] Stealing Movies: A subgenre of crime movies. It usually consists of a highly intelligent heist action story with a well-deployed, cooperative multiplayer group.
[2] Progressive entanglement: As characters face increasing confrontation, more and more conflict, creating a series of successive events.
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