The Asphalt Jungle

 There's no asphalt visible in the opening shot of John Huston's 1950 heist movie, The Asphalt Jungle.  Curiously, the first thing that we see is a low-angle expanse of what seems to be cobblestones tilting gently up to a curving promenade where a couple of taxi-cabs are moving.  The cobblestones are pointillist, little units each similar but independent from the other -- this field of cobbles represents the film's narrative strategy, small differentiated units of story each assigned to a various characters and assembled into a mosaic.  Huston's film has many characters and the directors take great care to delineate each of them individually, to give them salient features and a rationale for their behavior.  The film's crooks are all sympathetically observed, given quirks and character traits, and, therefore, lifted above the cliches and stereotypes that film noir of this era customarily employs.  It's a beautiful movie, impressively shot in documentary style black and white, although with some images heightened with a faint trace of German expressionist shadow and fog -- the frames are composed with angular geometric shapes, profiles arrayed against characters in full frontal appearance and interesting contrasts between fore- and background, deep focus in which different planes of action can take place.  With the exception of the last two minutes, the entire film takes place at night, in the grim solitude of vacant lots, empty warehouses, and dark mean streets.  It's an unnamed nightmare city, the city of dreadful night, swarming with armies of belligerent cops suddenly intruding on thoroughfares that are otherwise curiously deserted and desolate.  Some of the action centers around a cafe next to a hulking slum tenement labeled PILGRIM -- perhaps it's a Salvation Army outpost in the poor part of town; the cafe, run by a criminal fixer and hunchback named Gus, is so disheveled and rundown that it seems amazing that such a place even exists or could have customers.  A cab laps up milk from a bowl on the counter as the criminals, who haunt this place conspire.

A renowned professional jewel thief, called "the Doc" has just been released from jail.  The "Doc" speaks with a heavy German accent, but has continental good manners and a courtly demeanor.  Evidently, his eight years in jail didn't rehabilitate him -- his first act on the outside is to contact the local mobster and start raising funds for an epic jewel heist.  Doc says he needs a "box man", a driver, and "hooligan" (that is muscle).  The box man is a safecracker, ethnically Italian, who lives with his wife and small infant son in a squalid, dismal apartment -- he's a lower middle-class crook who is looking for a way to a better house and a little more money for his growing family.  (All the crooks are supplied with details as to the economies and their place in the local criminal ecosystem.)  The "hooligan" played by Sterling Hayden is a country boy whose "Rosebud" is the bankruptcy of his family farm in old Kentucky and the loss of a particularly fine black colt with whom the boy had bonded.  Embittered and, probably, homosexual, the hooligan lives alone, now and then, employed as a collection agent to make desultory threats against deadbeats.  Gus, the hunchback and cafe proprietor (who is a cat lover) will drive the car used for the heist.  A local mobster who runs gambling rackets puts the team in touch with a corrupt lawyer.  The lawyer's role is to finance the robbery and arrange for the hot merchandise, diamonds and other gems, to be sold to a fence.  Unfortunately, the lawyer is underwater with debt himself, probably due to his expensive moll, a glamorous blonde played by the very young Marilyn Monroe -- even at this stage in her career, she's iconic. The lawyer also has an elegant bedridden wife with whom he plays cards in bed -- she pathetically spruces herself up with earrings and a lissome negligee to revive the wretched lawyer's interest in her.  (He's obsessed with blonde who he's keeping on the side, a little girl who calls him "Uncle Lon.")  The lawyer is so crooked that he can't be trusted even by his fellow criminals and, ultimately, he betrays the enterprise out of his own panicked greed.  

Huston is anxious to give everyone on screen their "reasons' for both their criminality and their various loyalties.  (It was Renoir who said that the tragedy in life arises because everyone, even the most vicious, "have their reasons.")  The heist goes wrong -- the poor family-man, the "box man" gets shot in a scuffle in which a dropped gun fires; it's a pure accident, the first of several in the film.  The movie insists that accident prevails over planning -- men are at the mercy of malign coincidence and mishap.  For some reason, a burglar alarm, apparently in a nearby building, sounds and the grim streets with their classical colonnaded facades of banks and big empty avenues are suddenly aswarm with cops.  The police are corrupt -- in fact, one cop is in cahoots with the mobster running the gambling dives and it's cheerfully assumed that the police will beat confessions out of anyone that they catch.  The police commissioner views the robbery as an affront to his conception of law-and-order and he mobilizes an army of cops to hunt down the burglars.  Crime doesn't pay and the criminals, who are far more sympathetic than the relentless Kafkaesque police, are all arrested or gunned down.  The picture is episodic and the narrative has to dart from one character to another to make its melancholy points -- there's not much of a through line since all the crooks have different motivations and traits.  Several sequences stand out:  a small-time hooker who goes by the moniker of "Doll" loses her place to live and has to bunk with the hooligan -- he seems absolutely terrified of her, a very odd reaction for such a big bruiser and there is some implication that the woman's sexuality alarms him; she obviously likes him and remains loyal to the end although we don't ever see them touch and they sleep in chaste twin beds.  In a huge close-up, she peels off her fake eyelashes, an image that is strangely repellent.  The final scene with the hooligan bleeding to death in a field with several beautiful horses is memorable -- I saw this movie on TV fifty years ago and the concluding scene in the Kentucky pasture has always stayed with me.  There's a bizarre McCarthey-esque scene in which the police commissioner is confronted about the corrupt cop; in a political savvy move, the commissioner deflects the criticism away from his agency, switching on a police radio with various channels in which dispatchers are sending cars to crime-scenes.  "All of these are calls for help," he says.  Then, he melodramatically shuts off the radio -- "what would happen if the channels all went dead?" he says.  It's an example of Huston's "just the facts" approach to this film -- we don't know if we are to read the Commissioner's ploy as a serious endorsement of law and order or as a cynical non sequitur.  Another scene in which the German jewel thief, a character right out of an Erich Kaestner novel, delays his escape to watch a girl dance to juke-box music is also extraordinarily memorable -- the police apprehend him because of this little indulgence, either an indictment of a moment of weakness or folly that is to be praised; we have to make up our own mind about this.