A Dassin Dossier

25Mar09

J. Hoberman’s got a sharp and snazzy piece in the New York Times on American expat director Jules Dassin—just in time for Film Forum’s fifteen-film retrospective of his career. The blacklisted filmmaker of black-hearted crime dramas (and a couple of hot-blooded comedies), Dassin, who died last March at the age of ninety-six, is celebrated by Hoberman both for his classic postwar noirs (Night and the City, Thieves’ Highway) and his lesser-known works, like Up Tight, a rare, late-sixties black-power updating of John Ford’s The Informer that will be showing at Film Forum.