The Asphalt Jungle

Here's one of those glorious film noir/heist movies where a bunch of colourful characters get together and plan a heist that couldn't possibly go wrong, no sir-ee! In the best '50s film noir tradition, the crime in question is dissected in great detail before our eyes as we witness the planning and execution of this heist, and all the time we feel the tension behind the actions as we just wait for that inevitable mishap that will cause everything to unravel, and the various degrees of human error and deception factor in with entertaining abandon.

Directed and co-written by John Huston, who at this point had a good ten years of directing under his belt and had already put out a few classics (including the seminal noir flick The Maltese Falcon), The Asphalt Jungle takes the viewer into the world of career criminals with an almost documentarian eye for clarity of action and character defects. It's really quite decent, and features a superb cast of character actors playing a variety of hoodlums, deadbeats and scumbags (the standouts would have to be Sterling Hayden as the doomed lead, and Sam Jaffe as the unassuming mastermind with a weakness for the ladies). It's worth watching if only for the last half an hour or so where everything (as expected) goes astonishingly and horribly wrong.

The film's title is an allusion to the 'wild' criminal underworlds that exist in big cities. The city in Asphalt Jungle isn't specifically named, and it could really be any major city in America. When it wasn't focusing on the everyman's occasional divergence from morality, the film noir genre was exposing an underclass that hadn't really been given centrestage outside of the exploitative and often cartoonish gangster films of the 1930s. Now, I'm not denying that there isn't an element of exploitation at play in this kind of film noir, but there's an element of grey morality here that allows for more realistic characterisations and an exploration of crime hitherto unseen. The Asphalt Jungle is one of the classic Hollywood heist films, and is seen by many to be the progenitor of the whole heist/caper subgenre.

DIRECTOR: John Huston
WRITER/SOURCE: John Huston and Ben Maddow, based on a novel by W. R. Burnett
KEY ACTORS: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, John McIntyre, Marilyn Monroe

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett.
- Made into a TV series in the'60s, also called The Asphalt Jungle, and starring Jack Warden.
- Remade twice; once as a Western called The Badlanders and again as a blaxploitation film called Cool Breeze.
- To see what the other side of the pond was doing with this genre in 1950, see the more light-hearted caper film The Lavender Hill Mob.
- Gritty heist film noirs that all owe a creative debt to this film: Rififi, Grisbi, The Killing, Heat and Seven Thieves.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Sam Jaffe), Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Film.
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
Venice Film Festival - won Best Actor (Jaffe). Also nominated for the Golden Lion.