Harold Becker really really really wants to shoot a heist film

Variety reports today that Al Pacino and director Harold Becker are reteaming on a remake of Jules Dassin's 1955 heist masterwork Rififi. This would be the second Pacino-Becker collaboration presently in the works, joining the Paul Schrader-scripted gangster-romance film Torch in the pipeline for 2006.

The pair, who last worked together shooting the kinda-underachieving 1996 political potboiler City Hall at points in and around NYC, has a little bit more than Paul Schrader to live up to in undertaking Rififi. Dassin's original is best known for its sublime half-hour jewel heist that unfolds without dialogue or music and has been ripped off in one form or another by everyone from Melville (Le Cercle Rouge) to Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven). Better yet are Jean Servais' simmering work as world-weary ex-con Tony le Stephanois and Dassin's classic Parisian noir that we can only hope Becker replicates in some way for Gotham.

No word is available, however, on how Rififi matches up with the London-set Baker Street (aka The Bank Job, aka Harold Becker in Development Hell), the other heist film Becker has had in the works since early 2004 and which could very well be Rififi's first casualty. But hey--that's London's problem, not ours; the way I see it, those bastards still owe us for "borrowing" Kim Gordon and Michael Pitt.