Rififi is one of those films that is so accessible and so engaging that it’s a wonder it’s not become one of those Christmas action staples like The Great Escape (1963) or Where Eagles Dare (1968). It has everything that the American popcorn movies have and more: tension, action, even a (somewhat incongruous) song, but because it is the brainchild of a black listed director, Jules Dassin and made in France, it has become pigeonholed with art house movies.

At the centre of the film is the heist sequence – the best part of a third of the running time entirely without dialogue or music, just the main characters breaking in to a bank, drilling the back of a safe and escaping. There is a great sense of tension and an artfulness in these scenes – the robbers moving in coordinated and practised actions in silence, occasionally punctuated by postmen and policeman patrolling outside – a robbery shown in such detail that the film was banned in some areas in case it gave criminals a blueprint. There is something almost Bressonian about these scenes – the closest relation is  Robert Bresson’s minimalist, stripped down A Man Escaped (1956), but Dassin’s movie is anything but minimalist. The focus and precision of this second act is balanced by the noirish plotting of the first, and the desperate emotions of the third.

In this recent documentary about the heist movie, Mark Kermode used Rififi as a primary example, a template that sums up the structure of the genre. But it is where this film adds to the generic form that makes it really interesting – principally the director’s political edge coming out in details. It is noteworthy, for example, that the act that brings the robbers down in the third act is one of avaricious greed – one of the team has to take one extra item of jewellery. The heist is magnificent and absorbing, but Rififi is a truly great film because of the details that surround the heist and the performances of the actors. Even the musical interlude works here – lending a kind of Jean-Luc Godard coolness to the first act. See Bande à part (1964) for an example of how this is parodied.

Watch with A Man Escaped for a similarly satisfying experience of a movie that focuses on details.