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GEORGE BLUESTONE
After Cannes, Dassin is tired. The porters have finished sweeping up the municipal casino where, only a few hours before, at midnight, a final banquet had been held in honor of palme dor recipients. At a ceremony in the Palais du Festivals, just before the banquet, Dassin heard the official announcement: to France had gone the award for the best entry from a single country. With some justice, Robert Bresson had received the best director’s prize for A Man Escaped. But Dassin knows, too, that He Who Must Die was considered by the jury for a joint actor’s citation. He remembers the past two weeks, the peculiar blend of excitement and exhaustion that possesses La Croisette. On the day before Dassin’s film was shown, under its original title, Celui qui doit mourir, the news of Senator McCarthy’s death reached Europe. Jokes and puns were irresistible that day. Between distribution negotiations, publicity lunches, and press conferences, Dassin must have smiled his ironic smile often over that titular accident.
But all that is over now. In the lobby of the Martinez, Dassin wears the director’s habitual dark sport shirt, and a linen off-white panama suit to resist the brilliant Mediterranean heat. The beaches outside, where Dassin occasionally found time to swim, are temporarily deserted, quiet between the crowds of the festival and the crowds of approaching summer. Dassin’s eyes are tired, as streaked with red now as his hair is with gray. But he speaks gently, clearly, as articulately as an actor, as precisely as a critic, like a man who has mastered his craft and found time to consider its implications. You are reminded of the way Hervé le Boterf describes him on location in Crete: orchestrating a ninety-man crew, fighting sickness and primitive conditions, working a very tight shooting schedule in the shadow of Sarakina, Dassin retains his “amazing calm,” his “constant courte
sy.”
That courtesy, that calm are even more striking when you recall the way he once explained his fascination with violence: “All that is violent interests me just as all that is brutal sickens me. Brutality is cold, inhuman, whereas violence is a reaction that precipitates crisis. For the same reason, patience intrigues me because patience is often the beginning of violence. Following the impulse that leads to it, violence can become constructive or destructive. These are the elements which fired me, pushed me to make He Who Must Die. Violence is intensified power. And I have always marveled at the power that resides in man.”
Interviewer: We’ve probably heard the story of how you came to leave Hollywood from everyone except yourself. Would you care to tell us what really happened?
Dassin: Well, let’s be clear about this. I’d always wanted to work in Europe. After I left Morris High School in the Bronx and traveled abroad, I knew the Continent would be congenial to the work I wanted to do. After I finished Night and the City for Fox in London, I came over to the Continent. That was at the end of °49, early ’50. As it turned out, Night and the City was the last film I was to make for an American com