I’m a little late, but it’s time to mention a couple of important practitioners of the lost art of great middle-brow entertainment who have passed on. They were also both Jewish liberals. Not unusual in Hollywood, but these two played the liberalism game like they meant it and both fought real life injustice where they found it, and that’s not a small thing.

Jules Dassin might be best known by some as the director of Never on Sunday starring Melina Mercouri, which still sits on my DVR queue, unwatched. But I first noticed Mr. Dassin’s name on another film with Mercouri (who was also Mrs. Dassin), the strangely forgotten, amazingly stylish mid-sixties tongue-in-cheek caper film, Topkapi. Even pan-and-scanned and chock full of commercials late at night, it was a wonder. As a twelve-year-old, the scene where chubby Peter Ustinov, playing a character described by Ms. Mercouri and boyfriend Maximilian Schell as a “shmoe” and winning an Oscar in the process, is kissed on the mouth by the glamorous Mercouri threw me for a loop. I identified with this shmoe (as a kid I could have easily passed as Ustinov’s son and I think I knew even then that we’re both born on an April 15),and it was as if Mercouri were kissing me, which was something.

When I caught up with the film at the New Beverly a few years back, I was delighted to see that it held up remarkably, right from a dazzling, quasi-psychedelic opening scene to lengthy dialogue free heist sequence. If it wasn’t quite perfect, it was the kind of entertainment that took entertainment seriously, and for my money no tongue-in-cheek heist movie half as good would be made again until Steven Soderbergh breathed life into the form in his (critically and bloggily) underrated version of Ocean’s 11.

And it was only a few years back when I was finally able to see the film that Dassin was gently spoofing with Topkapi, the legendary and far more serious caper film, Rififi, which for brief spells can be a bit dry in the mechanics of the jewelry robbery — the wordless jewelry robbery sequence is brilliant, but the appreciation is perhaps more intellectual than emtional, but the movie is strong on character and the aftermath is one of the compelling, even devastating conclusions of a heist thriller I’ve ever seen. Not a perfect film either, in my opinion, but a great film demonstrating that crime really doesn’t pay, after all.

As it happens, Rififi is being remade with Al Pacino and a screenplay by Bo Goldman, which I guess might work. And, Topkapi is being remade as the sequel to the Thomas Crown Affair remake, if you can believe it and will be directed by Paul Voerhoeven, who I’ve really grown to hate in his post-Robocop life. (And don’t get me started on Black Book.) I hope, at least, that neither film dishonors Dassin, who also made some unusually strong — some would say great — film noirs, was blacklisted (he dropped out of the CP in 1939 in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin nonagression pact, and long before the full evil of Stalinism was widely acknowledged), helped end the rule of fascism in his adopted home of Greece in the early seventies (yes, folks, there was real life facism in Europe as late as the seventies, complete with repression and torture….anything to defeat the commies, you now) and was as far as I can tell an all-around great guy.

And one more thing. While still a U.S. director, Dassin, along with screenwriters Albert Maltz and Marvin Wald (who died earlier this month), basically created the template for modern police procedurals, especially Law & Order, with the terrific and utterly enjoyable The Naked City. Another film to check out for sure if you’ve missed it.

Much more about Dassin over at Greencine. And don’t miss the World Famous Siren’s righteous takedown of an AP obit and loving homage to Dassin’s fifties output.

*****

And, speaking of righteous indignation, it’s also important to mention the passing of screenwriter Abby Mann a couple of days back. Best known for Judgment at Nuremberg, which was a Playhouse 90 before it was a movie, and The Marcus Nelson Murders, which I recall as being a gigantically angry cop film for television about gross injustice — that somehow led to one of the most popular and disposable cop shows of the seventies, Kojak. Yes, the “who loves ya’ baby” Telly Savalas vehicle had its roots in an Emmy winning piece of agit-prop that left the young Bob shaking with anger. (I actually like movies that make me really mad, and always have…but this was almost too much.)

He later became a specialist in fact-based TV movies that were always watchable, didn’t shy away from coming to controversial conclusions, and even made headlines in his contention that the man who was convicted of a wave of Atlanta child murders in the seventies was innocent — which was probably not true. On the other hand, his contention that the McMartin school child molestation case was largely mass hysteria turned out to be counterintuitive, but also turned out to be the most correct interpretation.

Still, being a writer in Hollywood, Abby Mann didn’t really quite get the respect he deserved, I think….I don’t know for sure because except for Judgment, most of his trademark is unavailable and unseen by me since some time in the 1980s. Time for a DVD special edition of The Marcus Nelson Murders, if nothing else.

Once again, more on Mann via the invaluable Mr. Hudson of Greencine.

And, just because I love these kind of images, here’s a great pic from Jules Dassin’s Rififi…