While living in Paris, Jules Dassin pulled off the quintessential heist.
The Connecticut-born director of the caper noir Rififi, a French- and Italian-language movie that turned cinematic crime into an art form, died late Monday at a hospital in Athens. He was 96.
A cause of death was not released, but a hospital spokeswoman said Dassin had been a patient for the past two weeks.
Dassin, who won the Best Director prize at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival for Rififi, lived in Europe for more than half his life after winding up on the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist for his Communist sympathies, although he left the party in the late 1930s out of protest for its initial support for Hitler.
"I'm not bitter," Dassin told LA Weekly several years ago. "But there's an unhappiness for so many lives destroyed and for the effect it had on movies that were made, for a long time."
After helming nearly a dozen films, including the comedy The Canterville Ghost and the noir thrillers Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster in one of his first leading roles as an inmate at a hellish prison who plots a group escape, and The Naked City, Dassin went to London in 1950 to shoot Night and the City.
The classic noir, a genre that had become Dassin's bread and butter, starred Richard Widmark, who just passed away Thursday at age 93, as a small-time hustler who plots a can't-miss score that, as such things tend to do, goes horribly wrong.
After several fellow directors testified against him before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dassin moved on to Italy and France, and landed behind the camera on Rifiki, about four jewelry thieves who plot the perfect crime and then see it unravel when one of them shares the spoils with his mistress.
The film is famous for its 30-minute heist sequence, which contains no dialogue, and the every-man-to-his-specialty plot has shown up repeatedly in films such as Ocean's Eleven, Mission: Impossible and Reservoir Dogs.
At Cannes he met his future second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who he went on to direct and costar with in the 1960 dramedy Never on Sunday. Dassin plays a naive scholar who falls for a life-loving, free-spirited prostitute whose pimp pays the young man to tutor her because her joie de vivre is "bad for business." The film won an Oscar the following year for its original title song.
Dassin also directed a Tony Award-nominated musical version of Never on Sunday, called Ilya, Darling, a few years later.
"A first-generation Greek" was how the country's prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, referred to Dassin upon news of his death.
The onetime assistant to Alfred Hitchcock made his directorial debut in 1941 with another tale of the so-called perfect crime gone wrong, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.
"Tell them what you're gonna do, and then make them worry about how you're going to do it" was the advice Hitchcock once gave him, Dassin said in a National Public Radio interview in 2000.
After Mercouri, who served as culture minister of Greece for nearly a decade, died in 1994, Dassin started a foundation in her honor to promote the building of a new Acropolis museum.
Information on survivors or funeral arrangements was not immediately available, but according to the Associated Press, the filmmaker had expressed a wish to be buried next to Mercouri in Athens' First Cemetery.