''Rififi in Tokyo'' (French: ''Rififi à Tokyo'') is a 1963 French-Italian
crime film
Crime films, in the broadest sense, is a film genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine ...
directed by
Jacques Deray
Jacques Deray (born Jacques Desrayaud; 19 February 1929 – 9 August 2003) was a French film director and screenwriter. Deray is prominently known for directing many crime and thriller films.
Biography
Born Jacques Desrayaud in Lyon, France, in ...
and starring
Karlheinz Böhm
Karlheinz Böhm (16 March 1928 – 29 May 2014) was an Austrian-German actor and philanthropist. He took part in 45 films and became well known in Austria and Germany for his role as Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in the Sissi film trilogy a ...
,
Charles Vanel
Charles-Marie Vanel (21 August 1892 – 15 April 1989) was a French actor and director. During his 76-year film career, which began in 1912, he appeared in more than 200 films and worked with many prominent directors, including Alfred Hitchcock ...
and
Barbara Lass.
[Monaco p.160]
Synopsis
The veteran gangster Van Hekken arrives in
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...
to pull off a
heist of a precious
diamond
Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the Chemical stability, chemically stable form of car ...
from a
bank vault
A bank vault is a secure space where money, valuables, records, and documents are stored. It is intended to protect their contents from theft, unauthorized use, fire, natural disasters, and other threats, much like a safe. Unlike safes, vaults a ...
. However, when his planned second-in command is killed he has turn to the dead man's friend Carl Mersen.
Cast
*
Karlheinz Böhm
Karlheinz Böhm (16 March 1928 – 29 May 2014) was an Austrian-German actor and philanthropist. He took part in 45 films and became well known in Austria and Germany for his role as Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in the Sissi film trilogy a ...
as Carl Mersen
*
Charles Vanel
Charles-Marie Vanel (21 August 1892 – 15 April 1989) was a French actor and director. During his 76-year film career, which began in 1912, he appeared in more than 200 films and worked with many prominent directors, including Alfred Hitchcock ...
as Van Hekken
*
Barbara Lass as Françoise Merigné
*
Keiko Kishi
is a Japanese actress, writer, and UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador.
Life and career
She made her acting debut in 1951. In the 1950s, David Lean had proposed her for the main role in ''The Wind Cannot Read'', which is about a Japanese language instru ...
as Asami
*
Michel Vitold
Michel Vitold (1915–1994) was a Russian-born French stage and film actor.Durgnat p.141
Selected filmography
* '' Orage'' (1938) - Georges (uncredited)
* ''Adrienne Lecouvreur'' (1938) - Le tueur
* ''The Curtain Rises'' (1938) - Gabriel, un él ...
as Pierre Merigné
*
Eiji Okada
was a Japanese film actor from Chōshi, Chiba. Okada served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and was a miner and traveling salesman before becoming an actor.
Internationally, his best-remembered roles include Lui ("him" in Fre ...
as Danny Riquet
*
Masao Oda as Kan
*
Dante Maggio
Dante Maggio (2 March 1909 – 3 March 1992) was an Italian film actor. He appeared in 115 films between 1940 and 1975.
Born in Naples into a family of actors, Maggio had a turbulent adolescence that led his father to send him in an institu ...
as Luigi
*
Hideaki Suzuki as Itoushi
*
Eijirô Yanagi as Ishimoto
References
Bibliography
* Monaco, James. ''The Encyclopedia of Film''. Perigee Books, 1991.
External links
*
1963 films
1963 crime films
French crime films
Italian crime films
1960s French-language films
Films directed by Jacques Deray
Films based on works by Auguste Le Breton
Films with screenplays by José Giovanni
Films set in Tokyo
1960s French films
1960s Italian films
{{1960s-France-film-stub