Jules Dassin, 96, an American filmmaker who was blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies and who flourished as an expatriate with the celebrated “Rififi” and “Never on Sunday,” died March 31 at an Athens hospital. The cause of death was not clear, although Agence France-Presse reported that he died of complications from the flu.
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As he was gaining in critical stature, his career dried up after movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Mr. Dassin was a communist sympathizer.
Mr. Dassin, who briefly had been a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, went into self-imposed exile in Europe. He returned to acclaim with “Rififi” (1955), a heist-gone-wrong movie for which he won a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Director Francois Truffaut, then a film critic, wrote: “Out of the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen.”
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Although Mr. Dassin won the award for best director at Cannes for “Rififi,” the American distributor would not show it in the United States with the director’s name.
In the end, Mr. Dassin was caught between two cultures, American and European, and never entirely comfortable in either. “I had to pretend, and I still am pretending, that I identify with European culture,” he told The Washington Post in 1971, referring to his European films. “I would have been a better film director had I been able to continue my work in the United States.”
His first marriage, to Beatrice Launer Dassin, ended in divorce. A son from that marriage died in 1980. Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage.
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