Jules Dassin: You'll never work in this town again

Joan Crawford tried to bully him and McCarthy put him out of work, but Jules Dassin fought back each time. Roger Clarke talks to the legendary director of Rififi about whether he thinks Hollywood has changed

Ushered upstairs in a stuffy Piccadilly Hotel, I find myself alone with the 90-year-old director of Rififi (1955), whose life-story itself sounds like something out of a movie. I'm torn by the desire to quiz Jules Dassin frivolously and endlessly about his terrible experience directing Joan Crawford in Reunion in France (1942), and discussing far more solemn matters, in particular his being blacklisted by McCarthyite stooges in the early 1950s, and a summons to the Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities. He's certainly not averse to chewing the fat about politics, especially since he married a politician, the spirited actress Melina Mercouri who was similarly exiled from her native country by the Greek government junta of 1967. She later became the Greek minister for culture and a woman of considerable political clout in Europe, before her death in 1994. Dassin now lives in a street named after her in Athens, a man used to exile, and seemingly not much bothered by it.

Julius Dassin (as he was then named) was born to an exile, on 18 December 1911, in Connecticut, his father a Russian-Jewish barber and first-generation immigrant, who moved his family of eight to Harlem in New York soon after Julius was born. Julius subsequently attended High School in the Bronx and debuted as an actor in New York's legendary Yiddish Theatre in 1936, after drama studies in Europe. After writing radio scripts, he found himself briefly under the wing of Alfred Hitchcock at RKO during the shooting of Mr and Mrs Smith, and was snapped up by MGM. In 1942, he was in the thick of production-line film-making, with three movies in that year alone, the third of which was Reunion in France, with Joan Crawford as the heroine of the French Resistance. It also featured John Wayne as a pre-Pearl Harbor American pilot applying to join the RAF.

It was Wayne who saved him from the full wrath of Joan Crawford when the rookie director first went on to the set. "Making it was hell," he admits, in the sweetest of voices. "I managed to get a meeting with the MGM executives because I was concerned about the casting and the script. But they only wanted to talk about one thing. Hats. Hats were important. Joan Crawford is the heroine of the French Resistance and is sacrificed for their existence in the movie – I mean, she's captured and stripped of all dignity. And yet they wanted to dress her "for the fans". And this was talked about for hours.

"Finally, I got a word in and said I thought the script was bad. One of the executives took me over to a window overlooking the parking lot and said, 'Which one is your car?' I had this little old car at the time. And he pointed to his car, a big new thing. And he said, 'That's my car and that's your car, and I say the script is good'."

It didn't get any better, either. "On the first day we rehearsed, John Wayne – a very interesting man, extreme right-wing but really just a nationalist – was going through the script with Joan Crawford. It wasn't going well, so, of course, I said, 'Cut'. And the whole set just froze.

"My assistant panicked and pretended to call up at some imaginary guy, telling him to be quiet. John Wayne took me to one side and muttered, 'Never say cut to Miss Crawford. You just give a hand sign.'

"I thought this was just nonsense. But when I said 'cut' again, Joan Crawford walked off the set, and Louis B Mayer called me to the office and fired me. But then Crawford rang me at my house that night, and asked me to come to dinner. I came to this mansion and the door was opened by her two little girls wearing long white gloves. It was the longest dinner ever!

"And she asked me into the library, where she had thousands of books, and she said, 'Mr Dassin, do you think I'm a bad actress?' And I said, no, I don't. And she said, 'Don't ever say cut to me again. Just do this'." Dassin pauses to draw two fluttering fingers across his brow, like a diva having a neuralgia attack. "So that's what I did."

I'm fascinated to hear his account of the creepy and spotless realm of "Mommie Dearest", because, of course, one of those two little girls who opened the door to him was Christina Crawford – that same Christina whose biography of her mother passed into legend as the most spectacular hatchet-job in Hollywood history. Was she the witch of repute? The scariest mother in known history? "I suspected those white gloves," Dassin nods sagely. "I suspected the silence from the children."

But the problems didn't end after this rapprochement, which saw him rehired. Quite quickly, Dassin discovered that Crawford was busy avoiding her Dutch co-star Philip Dorn – he was an embarrassing ex-fling and she'd just remarried. He began to notice that Crawford kept mysteriously moving out of frame when she was in scenes with Dorn, so the camera would never capture them together. "I got so mad," recalls Dassin, who was perched on a camera crane at the time. "I jumped off the crane and the crane flew up – and I yelled, 'I'm gonna punch you on the jaw'. And then that whole New York gangster thing came out in her, and she took off her hat, and she put down her purse, and she pointed to her jaw, and said 'GO AHEAD!'."

Now, I don't want to misrepresent Jules Dassin, who considers his encounter with fearsome old Mommie Dearest a very small part of his early life as a director, and who, soon after, made a name for himself with moody film-noir classics such as Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Night and the City (1949).

Night and the City was actually the last movie he managed to shoot for Hollywood before being blacklisted, shortly after his fellow-director Edward Dmytryk identified him as a communist and his life collapsed around him. It wasn't until the Parisian heist movie Rififi – the mother of all "heist gone wrong" movies, in which Dassin also stars – that he found work, five years later. He was rehabilitated in the Sixties, but by that point he was married to Mercouri and settled in Greece and Switzerland.

I can't help noticing that several online US biographies of the man still refer to his "self-imposed exile" after his apparent rehabilitation, as if he was in some way being an awkward cuss in not returning to America, despite the vicious campaign waged against him by his own countrymen, a campaign that included the US embassies in countries including Italy and France successfully sabotaging his movie career abroad from 1949-1954 (Zsa-Zsa Gabor and the producer Jacques Bar were explicitly told that none of their films would receive a US release if they worked with Dassin).

Dassin famously never talks about his time on the blacklist. It's painful, even today. He had several post-Hollywood successes after Rififi, including the movie Topkapi (1964), which won Peter Ustinov an Oscar and was apparently the inspiration for the Mission Impossible TV series and recent Tom Cruise franchise (the first of which name-checks the Dassin original). His final film, Circles of Two (1980) has an elderly Richard Burton as a painter falling for Tatum O'Neal as a 14-year-old nymphet.

However, I do manage to squeeze a few words out of him about the McCarthyite blacklist. Looking at the campaign still being waged against Robert Altman after his post-11 September comments that the terrorists had copied the movies, I ask Dassin if he could ever see the blacklist returning to America in a new guise. He heaves one of the most terrible sighs I have ever heard. He has already found his letters to The New York Times "cleaned up" of criticisms of the Bush government. "Could it ever happen again?" he says, after a pregnant pause. For the first time in the interview, he looks every one of his 90 years, and his genial manner fades into sadness. "Somebody asked me that the other day. I always used to say: 'Never! It is remembered with shame.' But this present government scares me. Impose another blacklist? It might be possible. I believe it may happen again."

It's a sombre note on which to end.

'Rififi' is rereleased on 16 August