Week Thirty-Six: The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Director: John Huston

Producer: Arthur Hornblow Jr.

Writer: John Huston and Ben Maddow

Cinematography: Harold Rosson

Music: Miklós Rózsa

Studio: MGM

Starring: Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D. Emmerich), Jean Hagen (Doll Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Minissi), Sam Jaffe (“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider), James McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), Barry Kelly (Lieutenant Ditrich), Anthony Caruso (Louis Ciavelli), Teresa Celli (Maria Ciavelli), Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay), Brad Dexter (Bob Brannom)

Before You Watch the Movie

As we saw with Double Indemnity, the forties – driven by film noir – were a time when the traditional good guy/bad guy dynamic in movies was changing. As time wore on, this became even more pronounced and reached the point that whole movies didn’t contain a single good guy of significance. For example, in 1947’s Brute Force, the protagonists are all convicted inmates of a prison and the antagonist is the prison’s sadistic warden! One bit character provides a bit of moralizing but for the most part all characters are either bad or worse.

This development went hand-in-hand with the subtle changes from classic noir – Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, etc. – towards a more blanket genre of crime drama. There were still plenty of noir films made in the fifties, but more and more they were moving away from sensuality, oneirism, and cultural examination and moving towards gritty realism, depictions of professional criminals as apposed to the forties, where the darkness inside the average, law-abiding citizen took center stage.

Crucially, filmmakers also fleshed out these characters as real people with real problems who break the law yes, but do so for a real reason that isn’t just “they are evil.” Often, these professional criminals are highly sympathetic and tragic characters who only turned to the life of crime because of unfortunate circumstances or the environment in which they were raised. By presenting these characters as three-dimensional characters, it makes them much easier to root for, which is a good thing because of while movie of just unlikable bad guys wouldn’t be a fun watch.

The move from film noir to crime drama was mirrored in the visual style of the films themselves. Noir leans much more strongly towards stylized compositions with drastic lighting and dramatic mise-en-scene but the gritty crime drama adopted a more suitably stark realism. This can be seen not only in the toning down of Expressionism but also in the frequent location photography, particularly the use of run-down urban landscapes, emblematic of the moral decay of the big city. Here we see the influence of foreign film in Hollywood, as the look of the Italian neorealism movement is a clear inspiration for under-stylized films like The Asphalt Jungle.

The Asphalt Jungle and many of the crime dramas of the fifties use stark urban landscapes

Unlike the Expressionism of noir, The Asphalt Jungle has more understated cinematography...

...though it still doesn't 

This new style suited director John Huston, who often favored a toned down approach to filmmaking and even when he delved into noir, it was always more visually straightforward. Now that isn’t to say that his films are boring – quite the contrary – they just are not as showy as other directors. In fact, what seems to be a taking a simpler approach, is actually more complicated, subtle but not simple. This comes from the way his scenes are planned – like Hitchcock he storyboarded everything out before hand – in such a way that everything can happen in one single shot or frame. Characters are positioned so as to catch both sides of a conversation with cutting back-and-forth between them and action often takes place in the natural flow of a scene without any abrasive jump. This means that often the side or the back of the character’s heads are shown instead of their whole face like traditional close up or over the shoulder conversation would look.

Huston arranges the actors on the screen so that they can all talk without a cut...

...likewise, the action is similarly set up.

After You Watch the Movie (Spoilers Below)

As a writer as well as a director, Huston has several themes that run through his pictures one of which is extremely relevant to The Asphalt Jungle: failure. The characters in The Maltese Falcon (1941) fail to recover the prize that they have been killing each other over, all the treasure is lost at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Huston adapted Moby Dick (1956), a film famous for the failure of it’s protagonists, ditto for The Man Who Would Be King (1975). The Asphalt Jungle takes the cake though, as all the film’s main character end up either dead or in jail without any taste of the loot they worked so hard to acquire. Though censors would have mandated that all the perpetrators be brought to justice in one way or another, it is not just the fact that each character fails in their ambition but why they do that is interesting. Each character is brought down by some vice, weakness, or blind spot that they have which affects their better judgement:

Dix: his desire to get back the family farm - and his pride

Doc: lust for young girls

Louis: his family

Gus: his friends

Emmerich: Marilyn Monroe aka Angela

Cobby: his corrupt relationship with Ditrich

Part of the realism of The Asphalt Jungle is a calculated immersion into the world of crime. This is achieved by giving an in-depth look at the operation of the criminals themselves – something that goes all the way back to M in 1931 – particular the parts that they play in the heist. The would-be jewelry robbers aren’t just blanket criminals, they each have individual roles as part of a team:

The Planner, the Brains

The Hooligan, Muscle, a Heavy 

The Driver

The Box Man

The Bank Roll, the Money, the Big Fixer

The Middle Man

Just like you wouldn’t field as baseball team of all catchers, you wouldn’t plan to knock over a jewelry store with all “box men.” This idea of roles will become integral to the heist movie genre, solidified in 1960 with Ocean’s 11 – even more so in the film’s remake and its subsequent sequels – and the repeated in heist films throughout the decades such as The Italian Job (1969 and 2003), The Sting (1973), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Inception (2010), and Logan Lucky (2017).

The heist itself is emblematic of the fifties crime drama because it so completely avoids any level of stylization or flashiness. Instead, it is presented in a matter-of-fact way and the characters go about their business workman-like manner, like professionals just doing their job. Also, much detail is paid to the technical components of the heist; in previous years, such a film might show some lock-picking and then a safe being blown up, but The Asphalt Jungle has it’s characters constantly sliding under an “electric eye” and discussing the best manner to get into the safe.

The Asphalt Jungle follows the robbery from planning...

...to payoff.

As they leave, the security gate closes on the thieves like the prison bars in their future

Dix’s killing of Dexter is the opposite of this – a stylized, “cool looking” moment of sudden violence – yet it also looks ahead to future trends in action filmmaking. Previously, the average gun fight would be a very simply shot and executed but as that “cool” look became more important, so filmmakers did everything they could to make audiences drop their jaws at the inventiveness of the action sequences. Eventually, this would morph into a whole genre itself – “gun fu” – beginning with John Woo films like Hard Boiled (1992) or the John Wick films in which the action is precisely choreographed like a musical number. In fact, 2017’s Baby Driver did just that, choreographing a large portion of the film, including many of the shootouts, to music.

In one smooth, stylish move this scene goes from static to shooting

Again, central to the success of a film like The Asphalt Jungle is the fact that the main characters must at least somewhat likable. Dix may be a brute, but he is kind to Doll and has a sense of honor, even if it doesn’t stand for much given his profession. Gus and Louis go out of their way to take care of their friends and family and Doc has an appealing charm and reasonability to himself. Even the least likable of the bunch, Emmerich is given a little humanity through the character of his invalid wife and you do feel a least a little bad for him at the end. 

In fact, the least likable characters in the film are the law enforcement: Hardy, though not corrupt, has no appeal to him whatsoever and Ditrich is just as much of a criminal as the thieves.

In the The Asphalt Jungle – conveniently positioned in 1950 – we see many of the changes that were coming in the fifties and beyond when cinema would change in many ways, simultaneously edging away from the dream factory of classic Hollywood while also moving more towards a more stylized approach to action. These two seemingly contradictory trends would eventually come together to form much of modern cinema: realism mixed with visual excitement.

See Also

The Live By Night (1948) dir. Nicholas Ray

A movie that rather bold – for the time at least – suggests that not all criminals are horrible people and some may be more a product of circumstances and upbringing than any actual evilness. This is point is made even more devastating to the audience as it is mixed with young romance and eventually tragedy.

Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) dir. Don Siegel

A look at a prison uprising told with brutal realism. The prisoners, tough convicted criminals who stage a violent uprising, are still sympathetic characters for the most part, which is made even more impressive by the fact that unlike Brute Force the prison guards and administration aren’t the bad guys either. Instead, the prison system itself is the real villain of the story.

Rififi (1955) dir. Jules Dassin

Made in France by American director Jules Dassin, Rififi is an even more in-depth look at the planning, execution, and eventually falling apart of a heist. Filmed in a much more stylish way than The Asphalt Jungle, though with a strong lean toward realism non-the-less.

The Killing (1956) dir. Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick’s first major film introduces the world to his stunning, perfectionist’s visual style. Sterling Hayden again stars in a tale of planned and failed heist. A dark and cynical – as will be typical of Kubrick – look at the genre and also an influential one future crime and heist films.