I like Sydney Pollack, but it bugs me that an even better filmmaker, Jules Dassin, has gotten so little recognition by comparison.

He documented remarkable scenes of urban life. The Naked City is a crime drama from the late forties that was shot entirely on location in New York (a rarity at the time) and that followed policemen into what were then the teeming immigrant communities of the lower east side. Worried about his leftist leanings, the studio cut out much of the documentary aspects of the film, but the opening line ("There are thousands of stories in the city, and this is one of them") has endured, as has a remarkable black and white look at theft, murder, and police work.

My favorite Dassin movie was shot in French. Rififi features heist in Paris; it's the mirror image of Naked City in that instead of showing meticulous police investigations, it shows the care and planning that go into a robbery.

Dassin made the mistake of flirting with Marxism in the thirties, and was thus blacklisted after the war and went to France. He was a master of cynical noir crime films, and he inspired some of the great French directors, particularly Melville.

But this dry obit says nothing of what I wanted to say. Dassin could give you a whole life, a real complete person in only a couple of frames, as the wrestler in Naked City who doubles as an assasisn, whose life we understand the moment we see his tenement. He makes the audience root for bad people, but also gives us enough to know that they are bad -- it's more like later Sopranoes than, say, Butch Cassidy. Dassin was Dickens making gangster movies.

There's so much more to say about him; I wish more people would.

As for Sydney Pollack, he made films for grown ups, and I love him for it even though I don't love most of his movies. His acting was outstanding, and he played the kind of bit roles that Dassin would use to carry a film.