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. Adapting a pulpy novel he reportedly disliked, he transformed it into the definitive heist film, the standard against which the entire genre still measures itself.

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 film's centrepiece is its celebrated break-in — close to half an hour with not a word of dialogue nor 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 cinema's great sustained sequences, pure procedure rendered as almost unbearable suspense.

Banned in several countries by authorities who feared it functioned 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 insistence that crime carries its own gravity have made it a permanent reference point — the wordless heist that taught the movies how to steal, and that no imitator has bettered.