According to Wikipedia (footnotes omitted; links in the original), “Rififi (French: Du rififi chez les hommes) is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste Le Breton‘s novel of the same name. Directed by American blacklisted filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony ‘le Stéphanois’, Carl Möhner as Jo ‘le Suédois’, Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César ‘le Milanais’. The foursome band together to commit an almost impossible theft, the burglary of an exclusive jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music.”

(Shout out to cinéaste Eddie Muller, the host of Noir Alley, for featuring this classic French film noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) last month. Among the things I learned from Muller, film critic and future director François Truffaut praised Rififi this way: “Out of the worst crime novel I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I’ve ever seen.”)