Rififi, 1955. Directed by Jules Dassin, written by Dassin, with Rene Wheeler and Auguste Le Breton. Starring Jean Servais, Jo le Suedois, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Marie Sabouret, Janine Darcey, Claude Sylvain, and Marcel Lupovici.
I know what they say: they say that crime doesn’t pay. And it doesn’t I suppose. After all those years of hard living, you don’t come away with anything but the worst regrets. The stress kills you, the lies kill you, every little thing kills you, like going from good times to bad in a day. Shit, I literally had an apartment across from Central Park in Manhattan, had it for eight months, furnished, great view, full bar, and then, on December 11 (I can’t forget the date), I spent the night in a homeless shelter in the Bowery. But it can be just as bad going up, you know–Christ, you come across a bundle, you can leave the dregs for a great new place, but how do you furnish the thing? How do you get in with the neighbors, the respectable people? They know something’s up.
Throw kids in the mix and it’s worse. I had a little girl. Still do, I guess. But she hasn’t spoken with me in years. Never will, either.
I love Rififi. Watch that movie, and you’ll see how it was with a gang I was involved in. We didn’t do anything with safes and busting in like in the picture, though maybe that would have been more noble. Stealing from some wealthy bastard instead of televisions and radios out of some poor guy’s basement or warehouse. But my pals, we had that loyalty, like in the movie. Shit, I guarantee that’s the only French movie I could ever watch. Influenced me to no end when I was younger. Back then, when I first saw it, I was one of those shitheads who couldn’t do anything right–I’d steal, lie, cheat, but I had a heart, I knew, my pals knew it. I remember once, when I sold a pal’s saxophone right out from under him, I was holdin’ it while he spent a month in the pen for trying to buy some heroin off a cop. He gets out, comes to me, finds the axe is gone. We both cried, you know that? And he says, he says, “You know what Max, you’re the kind of guy you can trust with your life, but not your money.” Then he gave me a hug, went to go buy his sax. Never saw him again. That really hurt. But it was true. I guess the truth hurts more than anything else, doesn’t it?
Rififi hit me hard. I saw it in Times Square, at the Rialto. It wasn’t long after I lost that sax. I was really bumming, selling dope, stealing those televisions, doing whatever I could. So I saw Rififi, about the great jewel heist. I’ve seen this thing a hundred times if I’ve seen it at all. I own it now, watch it with friends, and they don’t like it, don’t like that it’s in French. So what? You wouldn’t ignore a beautiful woman if she spoke French, right? That’s how I feel about this movie.
See, what got me wasn’t the heist. That I could take or leave. I mean, it’s exciting, yeah, but real? No way, that’s all Hollywood. I’m not going to break safes and climb through holes in ceilings. But those guys, those thieves, they stuck together, and that’s what I liked. The main guy, Tony the Stephanois, he’s coughing throughout the flick, he’s going to die. Going to die because he’s old and let himself get locked up, taking the rap for his young friend, who had a kid. In the joint he caught some lung disease, tuberculosis, something. The kid was too young to do hard time, Tony figured, so he didn’t fink on his friend. I remember sitting there, in the dark, sucking on my Coca-Cola, and thinking, “son of a bitch, I’d never do that!” But then the movie progresses, and these guys all stick together… except one, and he brings it all down. I hate him still, just to talk about him now.
There’s one scene that gets me: when they’re opening the safe. They’re going to go in from the back, so these four guys lower the thing down so the safecracker can work on getting in. Of course, it’s heavy, hard, hard work even for four men. And you know what? It looks just like the soldiers raising the flag of Iwo Jima, except going the opposite way. All working together like that. Of course, there’s no glory to it, they’re robbing after all.
But that’s the thing with a movie like Rififi. Crime doesn’t pay… they all have to say that. But it does, kind of. You come out of a theater after seeing a show like that, and the sun’s so bright, and it seems like it’s shining especially hard on your prospects, and they’re not good. It feels like you do an honest day’s work and you come home broken. And where’s the thrill? When does your heart ever beat like it does when you’re doing something wrong, stealing something, wonderin’ if those footfalls are the cops or just some lunk out wandering? I’m here to tell you the heart doesn’t ever beat that way. And if you win, you’re sitting on a throne, a holy throne.
For us it became hot merchandise, like I said, tv’s and radios, whatever we could steal and resell, and very little violence. I made some friends, close friends in the business, got in with a group of guys like in Rififi, only not like Rififi, because you know life is never like a movie. But close, real close, and when they go to jail, it kills you. And when they die, it hurts even in your sleep. And the shame of it all, you get to share it, and the miseries you share, and the highs, you certainly share those. But we stuck it out, the four of us.
Now they’re all gone. Two died young, one at the hands of a cop who thought my pal was packing a piece. One’s in jail forever. I still write him, but I’m too old to visit. Sent him to a joint in Virginia. No one sees him. But I hear he’s healthy.
This’ll sound disrespectful, but sometimes I think it’s like soldierin’. You go through the good and bad with a guy, highs taller than the Empire State Building, and lows lower than the bottom of the Atlantic. And even though it makes you sick to think of some of the casualties, how could you have lived any different?
Me, my biggest regret’s family. I do see the guys in the park, walking with their grandkids, the life of a sucker peaking with a beautiful child in their arms. Maybe that’s the gold at the end of the rainbow, I don’t know. I saw Rififi just the other day, and it’s true, with this life there’s never any future. I’m lucky to be this old and not talking to you in a jail cell, or not talking at all ’cause I’m dead. My pal who died on the job, you know, I thought about how in Rififi Tony stays with his pal, stroking his hair because he’s sad as all hell. Man, I wanted to say good-bye to my friend, Cinch was his name, but I had to beat it for the cops. That certainly wasn’t like the movie. I hope Cinch was already dead, and not alone in his last moments…
Politicians and Professors will never understand, though: crime’s never going away, because real life’s like the movies just enough to keep us coming back for more. That’s awful I know, but it’s what I believe.
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