Blacklisted auteur of auteurs Jules Dassin (1911-2008) during the time there was no need for any extra red-tape on the dispenser, turned out the whimsical The Canterville Ghost (1943) and the piquant Two Smart People (1946) and before certain particles made their way towards the fan, and he would find himself in exiled as a result of that big, bad blacklist, found his direction with Brute Force, Naked City and Thieves Highway, 1949 was quite an ambitious year for the director. Thieves Highway starred Richard Conte as a truck driver fighting off the mobsters and Valentina Cortese (who is still among us at 94 years young) as the reformed girlfriend of chief hoodlum Lee J Cobb. His last 'Hollywood' film for many years was made in London ; Night and the City (1950) 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 the most of their roles as nightclub owners.
After a gap, Dassin concluded this successful run with an elaborate heist film which has since been cited as a french noir masterpiece - Riffifi. He then began to indulge a taste for European culture and arty films that usually starred his wife Melina Mercouri, who later herself would become minister for the arts in the Greek government. His one noted success was a rather curious dramatization of this relationship, the iconic Never on a Sunday (1959), starring Mercouri as waterfront lady of the night and Dassin himself as an American intellectual - he had started his career as an actor in the New York Yiddish Theater. A return to the heist or rechristened caper movie , the jocose Topkapi (1964) was also widely shown but most of the other films have fallen into the gap between genuine art movies and popular entertainment, disappearing rapidly from sight and seldom surfacing, even on television.