April 10th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

The Mid-Manhattan Library's ongoing Three Autuers of World Cinema series continues tonight with Federico Fellini's I VITELLONI. A successful comeback after the ambitious failure of THE WHITE SHEIK, Freddie F's seminal work is not so much a coming of age tale as a fighting-off of adulthood morality play. It influenced everything from AMERICAN GRAFFITI to DINER to Ed Burns' career. Influence ain't always a good thing. Looks like fun but the library never screens prints, so kudos for the effort but not my Pick.

Further uptown MOMA's excellent ode to the influence of 20's-era German expressionist cinema, The Weimar Touch, has barely gotten started! The museum today offers repeat viewings of Kurt Gerron's THE MYSTERY OF THE MOONLIGHT SONATA and the loony yet diaphanously beautiful Shakespeare adap A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, courtesy of William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt. Both noble choices, to be sure, but I've already selected MIDSUMMER on Monday and I've never seen SONATA, so I must pass. And anyway my Pick today is reserved for one of my fave directors all time, who may well reside somewhere in the medium's esteem between levels journeyman and auteur but who proved time and time again he flat out knew how to make a great film. Plus there was no other filmmaker who had a greater last laugh on Joe McCarthy. Leave it to a Bronx boy.

Julius "Jules" Dassin had to expatriate himself from his once prominent perch in Hollywood due to the efforts of the aforementioned Joe Fuckhead McCarthy. The director who'd taken his experience in Yiddish theater as a fledgling actor and repurposed it as cinematic storyteller, most successfully working with Mark Hellinger on a series of iconic noirs in the late 40's and early 50's, had come under the same Anti-Communist scrutiny the wholly batshit Wisconsin senator employed to terrorize postwar Hollywood. The man whose sure steady style made a lot of money for 20th Century Fox with fims like BRUTE FORCE, THIEVES' HIGHWAY, THE NAKED CITY, and NIGHT AND THE CITY, found himself on the outs once his name popped up on the dreaded list. After a few years of unemployment he took his chances in Europe, although it was a consequnce of the blacklist that any foreign film employing a blacklistee came under embargo in the states, still the most important market. With nothing to lose, he threw the dice.

They came up RIFIFI, only one of the most influential heist noirs in existence I thank ye! The film was a major success and reincarnated Dassin's dormant career. His name had been so wiped from the records by this point he had to explain to journalists in the U.S. that Zhyoolz Dasseeen, French auteur, was actually Julie Dassin from NYC. First to break the blacklist, and from this point forward he never looked back, crafting successful international works both dark and light like THE LAW and TOPKAPI. While accompanying the film at the Cannes film fest in 1955 Julie met Greek actress and all-around ball of fire Melina Mercouri, and fell in love with all things Hellenic. After two collaborations that cast his future wife in a supporting role, he graduated her to lead and sorta tellingly cast himself as her love interest, a New England college professor visiting the port village of Piraeus to study its ancient culture, who then falls under the spell of its modern culture while attempting to transform Mercouri's free-spirited prostitute a la Pygmalion. The flick has charm to burn, and Dassin's obvious love for his adopted culture shines through, culminating in the then enourmously popular hit song of the title, which would come to haunt us in elevators for millenia to come. In their later years the pair would become entrenched once more in the politics of their home, staunchly fighting the fascists who struggled for control of their country, and later seeing Mercouri serve as a member of the Hellenic Parliament. How could you not love these two? For today however, in celebration of spring romance, let's remeber them as two crazy kids in love.

Jules Dassin's NEVER ON SUNDAY screens at 1:30pm today through Friday as part of MOMA's ongoing Auterist History of Film Series. I know, it never screens on whatever I'm not going for that awful joke.

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