Harold Becker and Al Pacino

• email this story
• read comments (0)
• post a comment
• 
  
  

Harold Becker and Al Pacino are onto a good thing in remaking Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955), a classic noir famous for a totally silent heist sequence that lasts roughly 30 minutes...no dialogue or music and next to no "action," but hypnotic from start to finish. Brian DePalma shot a vaguely similar sequence in the first Mission Impossible ('96), but it wasn't quite as long. Will today's audiences sit still for another silent robbery, or will Becker and Pacino blow it off because they don't want to deal with people like me hammering them if they don't do it as well as Dassin? Becker will have to make the job as technologically challenging, of course, as the one Dassin's thieves faced in their day. One assumes that Pacino will play the "Tony le Stephanois" character, an ex-con with a hacking cough who organizes the robbery (and who was portrayed to hard-boiled perfection by Jean Servais in the original). And Becker and Pacino need to come up with a new title since Rififi slapped onto an English-language remake set in the U.S. would sound precious and anachronistic. Together, Pacino and Becker have made two films before, Sea of Love ('89) and City Hall ('01). No distributor or start-date has been announced, but this story should serve as a reminder to those of you who haven't seen Dassin's film to rent or buy the Criterion Collection DVD.