Blacklisted director Jules Dassin (1911-2008) once coined the first American neo-realist - had initially turned out whimsies such as 1943's The Canterville Ghost and the decidedly more adept Two Smart People (1946) at last finding his direction with hard-hitting noir entries : Brute Force, Naked City and Thieves' Highway, the last of which starred Richard Conte as a renegade truck-driver, fending off henchmen in hot pursuit as well as Valentina Cortese as the reformed girlfriend of the chief hoodlum (Lee J. Cobb). His last 'Hollywood' film for several years was produced in London : Night and the City (1950) which starred Richard Widmark as a would-be wrestling promoter on the run from gangland reprisal - British players Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan also made a meal out of their roles as nightclub owners. After an elongated gap, Dassin concluded his successful run with an elaborate French heist movie that boasts an historic thirty-three minute silent safe-cracking scene; Du Rififi Chez les Hommes (Rififi, 1955).
Dassin would indulge a taste for European culture and the art house film - not uncommonly starring his missus, actress Melina Mercouri, later herself to become minister for Culture in Greek government. His one popular success was a rather curious dramatization of this relationship, Never on Sunday (1959) an inert romantic comedy starring Mercouri as a febrile waterfront prostitute named Ilya and himself as an American intellectual - he had carved out his career as an actor in New York's Yiddish Theater. A return to the heist or caper movie, the jocose Topkapi (1964), a filmic adaptation of Eric Ambler's The Light of Day, was also widely screened; but a fair portion of Dassin's other films have fallen into the grey matter classification of genuine art movies and popular entertainment, disappearing rapidly from sight and seldom surfacing even on television.