Rififi notes

I probably should have written a full-length post on Rififi, which is airing at 2:00 PM ET today on TCM. It's probably a bit too late for a heads-up, but note that TCM has stuck the movie in a two-hour time slot, even though IMDb lists Rififi as having a running time of 122 minutes. If I remember correctly from the last time Rififi showed up on TCM in March for the Employee Guest Programmer month, it ran to just over two hours then as well.

Rififi was directed by Jules Dassin, the same man who brought us Topkapi. Both of them are heist movies, although Rififi is in the traditional mold, resembling movies like The Asphalt Jungle; Topkapi is clearly much more comedic like Ocean's Eleven. There are directors who worked in the same genre a lot, like John Ford with westerns, and directors who actually remade their own films, such as Frank Capra turning Lady For a Day into Pocketful of Miracles. But looking at a sub-genre like the heist film from two radically different perspectives is something rather less common.