Just heard that Jules Dassin died a couple of days ago. Dassin was an American, but made most of his films in Europe after being blacklisted. I rate Rififi very highly.
There’s a good obituary in The Independent, which starts:
The career of the film-maker Jules Dassin – from the cycle of realistically gritty thrillers with which he gained initial recognition in Hollywood to the embarrassingly high-falutin literary adaptations to which he turned his attention during his later exile in Europe – described a descending spiral which was more or less parallel to that followed by Joseph Losey.