Shown in the "50-years of cinema in Taormina" retrospective today, "Rififi" has of course the seminal safe-cracking scene where not a word is spoken for 28 minutes (no music either, all we here is the sound of the tools used to execute the robbery), and that could occur in a similar way in a movie today. It has the overall bleak and existentialist outlook on the world that is also typical for modern "film noir".
What is strikingly not modern about "Rififi" is the portrayal of women in the movie. They are forced to stand by and watch anxiously while the men do what they have to do. The Hollywood dream machine's take on feminism seems to have all-but-eliminated these sort of passive women's roles in modern movies – which, as we all know, don't necessarily reflect reality either, but maybe Hollywood role models will have an impact on real life at some point.
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