Rififi

Blacklisted in Hollywood and working in France, the American director Jules Dassin made Rififi in 1955 on a modest budget, and won the Best Director prize at Cannes for it. He adapted a pulpy novel he reportedly disliked and turned it into the definitive heist film, the one the whole genre still measures itself against.

Jean Servais brings a worn, weary gravity to Tony, the consumptive ex-convict assembling his team for a jewellery robbery in a fictionalised Paris underworld; Dassin himself appears, under a pseudonym, as the dapper Italian safe-cracker. The centrepiece is the break-in: close to half an hour without a word of dialogue or a note of music, the men working in tense near-silence as they bore through a ceiling and defeat an alarm. It is one of the great sustained sequences in cinema, made of nothing but procedure, and the suspense is almost unbearable.

Several countries banned it because the authorities feared it worked as an instruction manual for thieves. Rififi went on to shape everything from the caper films of the sixties to the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Michael Mann. Its fatalism, its rain-slicked streets and its sense that crime carries its own gravity have kept it a permanent reference point. The wordless heist taught the movies how to steal, and no imitator has bettered it.