The Asphault Jungle: DVD & Movie Review

Nominated for four Academy Awards, John Huston’s 1950 noir-caper “The Asphalt Jungle" is high-end noir in a low-end world.

It’s among the most urban and hard-boiled of the genre. Tough and menacing, its lack of humor deepening the dysfunction, the film has an air of urgency that consumes it.

Everyone here is on the make, desperately muscling their cut of the action so they can have the means to break free from their lives of crime.

In this case, the action involves a heist devised by ex-con, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), a mousy man recently sprung from prison who has an ingenious plan to steal $1 million worth of jewels from a swank jeweler. To do so, Riedenschneider enlists the help of several men necessary to pull the job.

Chief among them is Emmerich (Louis Calhern), the bankrupt lawyer financing the deal while trying to keep his middle-aged wife (Dorothy Tree) happy, and his demanding young mistress (Marilyn Monroe, brilliant in her first screen role) a wee bit happier. If he looks exhausted, there’s good reason--these two keep him running.

Doing the grunt work are Louis (Anthony Caruso), a family man and gifted safe-cracker caring for an ill child; Gus (James Whitmore), who knows how to drive a car with the sort of nimble swiftness needed in a getaway; and Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the film’s emotional center, who smolders as the enforcer of the heist.

Dix is in love with Doll (Jean Hagen), though he never shows it. Ruined by a life’s worth of disappointment, he’s soured by the sort of self-loathing that tends to turn good men into crooks. When the heist goes wrong, Dix and the others find themselves in a fix, with the cops suddenly “crawlin’ all over,” as the ever-worried Doll succinctly puts it.

As written by Huston and Ben Maddow from W.R. Burnett’s novel, “The Asphalt Jungle” differs from other film noirs in that Huston (“The Maltese Falcon,” “Key Largo,” “The African Queen”) doesn’t demonize his criminal characters or their behavior.

The film is essentially an American tragedy, with Huston trying to understand his characters and their choices, knowing that most are conflicted men waging interior wars with their morality and their conscience. They may lose, but Huston doesn’t exploit any of them. He allows them their mistakes, then quietly, without malice, takes the world away from them when they go too far.

“The Asphalt Jungle" begins on the mean streets of some unnamed, grimy, mid-western city, but when it ends, it ends in the plush countryside. There, hope stretches deep into a field where life is meant to begin. It’s a haunting finish to a terrific film.

Grade: A