Smothering silence. A close-up of a man’s face, sweat pouring down its craggy exterior. He reaches out, another man hands him a tool. Zoom out. We see a safe. The tool is being used to crack it open. Inside the safe hides a better life. Or at least that’s what these men have told themselves. They only need to push a little harder and retrieve it.

If you’ve seen a heist picture, you know these beats well. The best of them don’t solely show you the process of pulling the score—they practically fetishize it. Everyone from Steven Soderbergh to Michael Mann knows to slow down, no matter how fast-paced the proceedings. Because beyond sexy, slick actors making off with cash, jewels or gold, we’re here to see how it’s done. There’s something so tantalizing about guys who are so goddamn good at the art of the steal.

Our finest living filmmakers didn’t just stumble upon this, however. It’s no accident that all great heist epics move like this. They’re all drawing from one well: Rififi. A masterpiece that redefined heist cinema into a genre of its own. A film so enduring that many regard it not simply as the greatest heist film ever made but, as its place in Letterboxd’s Top 250 Narrative Features shows, one of the greatest films ever made, period.

Rife with peril and intrigue, it would only make sense that the genre’s defining feature was borne out of refuge. In the 1940s, Jules Dassin was one of Hollywood’s finest purveyors of noir. From The Naked City to Brute Force, Dassin wasn’t strictly making great crime capers: he was making statements. Brute Force, in particular, an oil-black prison picture, is as vicious a condemnation of the prison industrial complex as you’ll ever see. Forget the 1940s; its venom directed at the United States’ lack of care towards restorative justice and rehabilitation would feel vital now.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Dassin would be one of the earliest names to appear in House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Accused of being a Communist during one of the darkest moments in American history, by a fellow director no less, Dassin was blacklisted from Hollywood. His final film before his cruel expulsion, Night and the City, is widely seen as one of the finest noirs ever made. A body of work boasting any of those titles, let alone three, would see Dassin as one of the great filmmakers of his era. If it ended there, we’d still be talking about him today in mournful, reverent tones. Thank God, the French had no such qualms around the idea of Dassin leaning a little Red.

Dassin’s return to the silver screen came five years after his unfair removal. Asked to adapt a crime novel by Auguste Le Breton titled Du rififi chez les hommes, Dassin shortened the title simply to Rififi. The title wasn’t his singular change. Ever the progressive and far ahead of his time, in a supplemental interview on the Criterion Blu-ray, Dassin revealed that he cut much of the novel’s wildly racist undercurrents. Streamlining the story down to its base elements—a theft and the men who do it—Dassin found a way in that would set the template for every heist film worth its salt going forward.

His next course of action is to track down his former girlfriend, Mado (Marie Sabouret). Tony not only finds her working at a nightclub owned by a vicious gangster, Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), but she’s his moll as well. Tony invites her back to his shack of an apartment and, in a shocking moment of violence, beats Mado with his belt. Dassin is wise enough to allow the beating to play off-screen, but it’s here that he laces in one of many formative “rules” of the genre: a scumbag with a code.

See, Tony is a man of principle. If you’re his woman, years of prison time be damned, you’re staying his woman. You break that? Well, tough luck. It’s a disturbing and effective moment that immediately seals Tony’s fate in the film’s bleak finale. Broke, depressed and without his woman, Tony circles back to Jo and tells him he’s in. His condition? They aren’t just stealing a few gems. No, they’re going for the whole store. Needing a safecracker, the men bring on César (Dassin himself), and from here, the four begin planning.

We’re right around twenty minutes in, and Dassin has already laid the rules of the game out with precision. The heist is in its planning stages, yet we have a guidebook for cinematic heists written in stone. Ex-con, back on the scene after a prison stint (Ocean’s Eleven). The international crew, made up of a Frenchman, a Swede, and two Italians (Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Ronin). The con’s ex-girlfriend shacked up with a man of power, the heist spurred on out of the con’s vindictive nature (Ocean’s again). It’s all here.

Watching Rififi all these years later, it’s shocking how the beats play out exactly as we know them, and somehow, thanks to Dassin’s economy of storytelling, it feels as fresh as ever. Dassin’s unspooling of the next seventy years of the genre is a magic trick. There’s a reason this one stuck. Screenwriter Russell Hainline, much like Dassin, gets to the point rather succinctly in his Letterboxd review: “One of those movies where you don’t only see how it influenced everything in its genre that followed… You see *why* everyone was influenced.”

Influential is one thing. Any old film can do that. It’s not always popular to it this, but sometimes going back to the source of that did something “first” can lead you into musty, turgid avenues of celluloid that are largely ed because of their influence. Those films that stand the test of time, though? There’s a reason they stick to the ribs beyond a point of inspiration. It’s because they’re that damn good. Dassin wasn’t content molding the future with some stock character markers or basic stakes; he went ahead and crafted the finest heist sequence ever put to film. It’s enough to make you mutter “this crew is good” at the screen.

From planning to the heist itself, Dassin’s sense of visual storytelling is astonishing. So little is said through unnecessary dialogue during the former. There’s no time for superfluous wisecracks that riddle our modern film landscape. This is life or death. A standout bit of planning comes from the team trying to understand the alarm system. A snip of the wire, *RIIIINNNGGG*, a terse grunt from Tony to stop, try this wire instead, more ringing—we’re not even in the heist, and Dassin’s got us by the throat. He’s exercising a stunning control of craft rivaled primarily by his men on-screen.

Director (and Letterboxd member) Christopher McQuarrie, who took up the Mission: Impossible mantle for the later installments, describes Rififi’s heist as inimitable in his review: “The film’s middle act features what is arguably the heist by which all other heists should be measured, ruthless in its efficiency, simplicity, inventiveness, and craft. And one that mocks the many attempts that have been made to top it.”

It’s tough to disagree with him. Few cinematic heists don’t call to mind at least one visual marker from Rififi. Watch Thief again, you’ll never look at James Caan’s sweaty, stoic face the same way. He’s César, patiently drilling through the safe. See Ronin’s mechanical efficiency, Robert De Niro and Jean Reno gesturing to each other silently. They’re Tony and Jo, moving in time through the room above the jewelry store, gliding around one another like a ballet. The entire history of the coolest side of cinema. It’s all here.

By the night of the heist, our crew is mute. No score, no words, all business. Seeing cinema change before your eyes is akin to traveling back in time and discovering fire. There’s no tense shoot-out with police as the heist goes south. There’s no back-and-forth yammering when something doesn’t line up the way it was supposed to. For thirty minutes, we’re enmeshed with four of the finest criminals on-screen or off, and watching them work plays out like a dance.

Dassin mirrors this in a small moment earlier in the film, a single shot of César’s nightclub songstress girlfriend, Viviane (Magali Noël), rehearsing, slowly pulling back as the band sets up around her, every member moving in time like Tony’s crew. Many highlight Viviane’s earlier performance, one wherein she sings the title song in a knockout number, but for me it’s this little bit of visual storytelling that threads Rififi together. The art of theft is a musical number. These four men have rehearsed every beat. Come showtime, they know the notes forward and back.

Spoilers for ‘Rififi’, ‘Heat‘, ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ follow in the rest of this article.

Dassin’s staunch left-leanings would never allow a violent misogynist like Tony to get away with it, though. That’s where he left one final point of inspiration for all who followed. Scumbag cinema so rarely allows for a happy ending. Dassin has respect for these men, no doubt. Quiet men of code digging through the ceiling of poverty, seizing from the rich—how could you not ire that? This life is built on poisoned ground, however, and the universe will always collect. Tony, as respectable as he is, can’t come back from his vicious treatment of Mado. The men he’s roped in with all succumb to the sin of knowing him.

You can live by a code of honor, but the sick injustice of our world is that the powers that be will never let you live in peace. Dassin created all-time greats for Hollywood, but when he didn’t align with their morals, they threw him out like trash. Unlike cinema’s greatest anti-heroes, though, Dassin got the last laugh. While time has caught up to all of those fictional men, we’re still chasing Jules Dassin. If the last seventy years have taught us anything, he’s going to run free forever.