"The Asphalt Jungle" (1950)

I spent about thirty years wanting to see The Asphalt Jungle (1950), but also a little afraid to watch it because I was worried it would disappoint me.  You see, I fell head over heels for Blackboard Jungle (1955) when I was fifteen, and I read in one of the random movie-trivia books I collected that the title for it was a riff on the title for one of the greatest noir movies ever, The Asphalt Jungle.  And that made me want to see this film.  But it also made me worry that maybe this wouldn't live up to how amazing Blackboard Jungle is.

Well, I'll never love Asphalt the way I love Blackboard, but that is just fine because they are wildly different movies, and I liked The Asphalt Jungle enough to add it to my movie collection after the first viewing, and watch it all a second time for this review.  Doesn't hurt that it kickstarted my emerging appreciation of Sterling Hayden.

The basic premise is this:  fresh out of prison, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) contacts a bookie called Cobby (Marc Lawrence) to ask if he knows some men who would be interested in participating in a heist.  He needs a "box man" (safecracker), a "hooligan" (muscle), a getaway driver, and a financial backer.  Cobby thinks this sounds like a great idea and suggests someone for each role.  The first part of the movie is basically "let's put together a team."

There is some SPOILAGE scattered throughout this review from here on out, but I try not to let slip the actual ending of the movie or what happens to various characters.  

Family man Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) is perpetually strapped for cash because he doesn't have a real job, but his baby keeps getting sick, and he's a great safecracker, so he signs on to be Riedenschneider's box man.

Horse-crazy Kentuckian William "Dix" Handley (Sterling Hayden) has a bad habit of picking losing horses and then having to go rob some store or whatever to get the money to pay his gambling debts to Cobby.  He'll be the hooligan in case there's trouble that needs to get punched in the face.  

Diner cook Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) is always ready to help a friend or passing acquaintance out, as long as it involves doing something illegal, plus he's always loaning money to people and then having none of his own, so he joins the crew as the getaway driver.

And bigtime lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern -- who was also in Blackboard Jungle, coincidentally) offers to be the backer for private reasons of his own.  Those private reasons?  He's broke, partly because he spends way too much money on his cute little twinkie in the city, Angela (Marilyn Monroe).

Cobby helps connect the team members to each other and gets a cut of the take for his troubles.

I keep reading reviews for this movie that opine about how the Hays Code forced the filmmakers to shoehorn the moral "crime does not pay" into what would otherwise be a superb caper film.  I beg to disagree.  It's the fact that the criminals all pay such a high price for their lawbreaking that makes this film a masterpiece.  If they'd gotten away with the heist, fenced the jewels, and each walked off rich... that's so boring.  Who cares?  But the way their own inner demons doomed them all to fail from the start -- that's the stuff classic storytelling is made of.  (I'm sorry if you feel like that is spoilage -- but a heist film made under the Hays Code should have a pretty obvious ending, so I think I wrote that vaguely enough that you can still watch this for the first time and have surprises coming your way.)

Louis Ciavelli's besetting sin?  I think he's lazy.  Instead of getting a steady job and working hard at it, he floats around doing semi-legal and illegal things.  Dix's is gambling.  Gus's is... boredom, maybe?  The inability to mind his own business?  The desire to stick it to the cops?  Maybe all of them.  Emmerich has two: committing adultery with his little girlfriend while his wife is sick, and lying to everyone about everything, all the time.  Cobby's is greed, always trying to get a slice of whatever illegal is going on.  And Riedenschneider's downfall is tied to his pet sin of pedophilia.

So when this bunch of lowlifes plans the perfect heist, and things start to go wrong, everything doesn't fall apart because of a surprise burglar alarm or a stray bullet or the Hays Code, not really.  It goes wrong because each of the perpetrators is a sinful human being who has been indulging their vices and started traveling the road to ruin long before the movie begins.  The heist just speeds up their inevitable individual downfalls.

That's something film noir excels at, isn't it?  Showing us how one wrong decision will lead to another and another, a food chain of mistakes and misdeeds that will eventually swallow a person whole.  Occasionally, a character in a noir picture can break free of their shuffle toward doom by doing something very, very right and noble and good.  And you do run across noir characters whose only bad decisions involve being too nice to someone or loving someone too much, like Dix's sorta-girlfriend Doll (Jean Hagen).  But all great film noir revolves around someone making a bad choice, and events spiraling out of their control, and The Asphalt Jungle plays that out beautifully.

Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Marilyn Monroe give the stand-out performances here, as far as I'm concerned.  Sam Jaffe may have gotten the Oscar nomination for this film, but I think his acting wasn't nearly as interesting as any of theirs.

Sterling Hayden convinces us he's simultaneously a good-natured country boy and a remorseless robber.  Dix is so sweet and kind to Doll when she needs a place to stay -- he gives up his bed and sleeps on the couch, and we never see him made advances to her, even though she would obviously welcome them.  

But Dix also commits robbery repeatedly, stares so menacingly at a witness that he terrifies the man into not identifying him in a police lineup, and is willing to swing a big and practiced fist at anyone who gets in his way.  Yet by the end of the film, he breaks my heart.  I can't help thinking if he could have stayed in Kentucky even after his family lost everything during the Depression, he would have turned out okay.  Now that's a well-rounded performance.

Jean Hagen's character, Doll, is one of the only fairly decent people in the movie.  She's down on her luck, but she's got a job (albeit as a dancer [possibly an exotic one] in a "clip joint," where customers are routinely bilked out of their money), she keeps her promises, and she refuses to accept any of the heist's loot.  Her weakness is Dix, but he's not a vice, just a guy she fell in love with when she should have known better.  Which, I think, is why she is free and alive by the end.  If you've only seen her as brassy Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952), you're going to be bowled over by her performance here -- she plays Doll as a sort of hesitant doe tiptoeing her way through the dirt that surrounds her.  She has seen enough of life to be careful and cautious about who she trusts, but can't help thinking the best about people once she does trust them.

As for Marilyn Monroe, her "kept woman" Angela is sweet, childish, enthusiastic, and thoroughly aware of how precarious her position is.  She's constantly adjusting her words and actions to see if they please the people around her just a little more.  We know Emmerich is her sugar daddy, and he's old enough to be her grandfather, but we someone don't blame Angela for this at all.  She's still somehow naive and cute and fresh, and yet we wholly believe she also is contented to be Emmerich's plaything.  Now there is a nuanced character for you, and it's no wonder Monroe got noticed because of this role.

Oh, and this is pretty random, but Emmerich has an employee who is played by Brad Dexter, and (like most people) I mostly know Brad Dexter as Harry in The Magnificent Seven (1960), so it's pretty wild to see him in this in '40s clothes instead of cowboy duds.

Is this movie family friendly?  I'd say it's teen-friendly.  There's some violence, obviously there's a lot of illegal stuff going on, alcohol and tobacco use is pervasive, and there's a suicide that happens off-camera (but we hear the shot).  Emmerich and Angela kiss once or twice, but that's it; Doll and Dix share an apartment for a few days (but appear to not be sharing a bed); and Riedenschneider's talk about yearning for young Mexican girls and leering at teenage girls dancing to Jukebox records is just oblique enough to be icky without being explicit.  This passed the Hays Code, y'all, so all sexual activity is only hinted at, not shown or even talked about directly.  And there's no cussing.

This has been my first contribution to Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon hosted by myself and The Midnite Drive-In this weekend.  I'll be posting an essay on why I love film noir tomorrow.

Here's one last screencap of Sterling Hayden because I didn't have anywhere else to put it.  And that's how you know he really is my new onscreen fascination, lol.