Rififi in the City (1963)

Rififi in the City is a very early Jess Franco film noir-influenced crime thriller.

A cop named Miguel Mora has infiltrated an informant named Juan into a nightclub called The Stardust. The Stardust is part of a crime empire run by an outwardly respectable businessman named Leprince. Unfortunately Juan’s cover has been blown and Mora is trying desperately to extract him from the Stardust in one piece.

Mora loses his cool, bursts into Leprince’s home and starts making threats. He gets a vicious beating for his trouble. Juan ends up in even worse trouble.

For Mora it’s now a personal vendetta. He doesn’t care if he’s dismissed from the police force. In fact he welcomes the idea. He intends to nail Leprince even if he has to use unorthodox or even extra-legal means to do so.

He has a few potential allies. There are Juan’s girlfriends. Juan was a handsome young man who had no difficulty attracting women and he always had several girlfriends at the same time. One of his girlfriends, Nina (a nightclub chanteuse), is Leprince’s mistress and she has reason to feel bitter towards Leprince.

Leprince has more than just Mora to worry about. Somebody is killing off his henchmen one by one. He thinks it might be Mora but he has plenty of other enemies so he’s not sure. The audience doesn’t know who is murdering Leprince’s stooges. We don’t think it’s Mora but Mora is a man obsessed so we can’t entirely dismiss the possibility.

Mora has gone lone wolf and it’s not certain whether, even if he finds hard evidence, the police commissioner will back him.

The best chance to get the evidence against Leprince would be to use Nina but that would put her in a lot of danger. Leprince is a ruthless man.

The writing credits are shared by Gonzalo Sebastián de Erice, Juan Cobos and Franco (from a novel by Charles Exbrayat). The plot isn’t dazzlingly original but it’s more than competent and the twists work pretty well.

While there’s plenty of noir influence is there a femme fatale? That’s for you to decide. There are several key female characters and they’re slightly ambiguous. Nina is the most interesting although that might have quite a bit to do with Maria Vincent’s sultry performance. Nina has been a gangster’s mistress but there’s plenty of good in her, although of course we can’t be quite sure where her loyalties will ultimately lie.

Miguel Mora is a good noir hero, a decent honest cop who goes off the rails a bit. Whether he can find his footing again is an open question. As the movie progresses Mora becomes increasingly a classic noir protagonist.

Like Death Whistles the Blues this is a movie that is vague about its setting but it just about gets away with convincing us that we’re in Central America.

As always in Franco film the music is crucial. Franco wasn’t just a jazz fan. Jazz influenced the pacing and the rhythms and the structure of his movies, something that would become very obvious by the late 1960s.

Much has been made of the Orson Welles influence on early Franco. Welles saw several of Franco’s early movies (including this one) and was highly impressed and he hired Franco to work on Chimes at Midnight. He seemed to regard Franco as a bit of a protégé. When you look at movies by Welles like Mr Arkadin and F for Fake the idea that Welles saw Franco as a cinematic kindred spirit doesn’t seem so crazy. They were both inclined to be undisciplined and to rely on the inspiration of the moment, and both had a taste for extreme cinematic experimentation.

This movie hits the ground running and early on we get some quite stylish action scenes, with a surprisingly high level of violence for 1963. Franco shows that he knows the tricks of the trade and throws in some Dutch angles and other cinematic flourishes.

There’s also a very marked film noir visual style. The movie was shot in black-and-white and there are plenty of shadowy alleyways and dark corners. The whole feel of the movie is very noir, and the noir atmosphere is very effective.

Interestingly we are told that these events are happening not in Spain but in an unnamed Central American nation. In 1963 Spanish film-makers had to tread carefully and the suggestion that respectable Spanish businessmen might run crime syndicates and might put pressure on senior police officers (and that senior police officers might be open to such pressures) would probably have been a bit risky. The fact that Leprince is an aspiring politician running on a platform of democracy would have made it even more advisable not to set the film in Spain.

This is a Jess Franco movie so you might be wondering if there’s going to be a slightly bizarre nightclub scene. The answer is yes. I certainly think a robot dancing with a girl in a bikini is a bit bizarre. It’s intercut, very effectively, with the scene in which Mora gets a savage beating.

It’s not as kinky as nightclub scenes in later Franco movies but Jess already understands that such scenes really build an atmosphere of sleaze mixed with glamour and danger. There’s a later nightclub scene that is somewhat sexier.

Severin have paired Rififi in the City with Death Whistles the Blues in an excellent two-movie Franco Noir Blu-Ray set (and it’s available on DVD as well) with an appreciation of the film by Franco expert Stephen Thrower.

Rififi in the City is a neat little film noir. Highly recommended.