Noir November: The Asphalt Jungle
Written by Cameron Geiser
Every day for the month of November, Cameron Geiser is reviewing a noir film (classic or neo) for Noir November. Today covers the John Huston classic The Asphalt Jungle.
The heist film is likely a story archetype that most people are familiar with. The typical story structure is much like filmmaking itself; assembling a team of skilled professionals, high precision execution of the plan, and the chaotic disillusionment afterwards (the edit). John Huston’s adaptation of The Asphalt Jungle is the first film to lay the familiar foundations we’d all come to know. It doesn’t hurt that it’s also a damn fine film.
This film has influenced Hollywood writers and directors for generations now, and it’s easy to see why. There are the obvious films to point to; Ocean’s Eleven, Inception, Heat, Baby Driver etc. The ingredients of a good heist film can be applied to a variety of other genres too though, Ant-Man and The Wild Bunch are just two examples of those ideas jumping to the Superhero and Western genres as well. Heck, we’re still getting solid releases of heist films to this day, earlier this year we got Michael Bay’s Ambulance, which was another excellent riff on the form. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville also paid homage to this film across many of his crime focused films, which we’ll get more into later.
Jean Hagen and Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle.
Between this and Huston’s earlier Noir in The Maltese Falcon, he’d now become a master of the genre that he helped to forge. Here he’s taken the story from the other side of the societal coin with this film focusing more on the criminal element rather than the Detective’s side of things, as with Maltese. This film’s quality certainly confirms Huston’s legacy behind the camera, at the very least. It’s tight, well crafted, and methodical when concerned with both the crime at hand, and the characters behind it.
This may be the finest example of the typical heist film set-up. First, there’s Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the brains behind the plan. He’s an old school criminal who was just released from prison and he’s got a plan that he’s been holding onto since being put behind bars. As soon as he’s out he heads to a club run by a well known Bookie, Cobby (Marc Lawrence), where his reputation is still known and respected. Cobby has the connections that Doc needs to set up the heist. Which leads us to the financier of the operation, Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), a well-to-do gentleman in town who has a respectable relationship with the criminal underworld. This leads us to Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) a Kentucky-bred farm boy who grew into a mountain of a man who’s not afraid to throw his weight around. His inclusion brings about the driver, Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) a punchy bar owner, and the safecracker Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), a family man who's back in the game for one last heist.
As you can imagine, things don’t go as planned. I won’t ruin exactly how everything goes wrong, but instead point to what further makes this film stand out amongst heist films, particularly of the Noir variety. The film has two main overarching themes that permeate every aspect of the production, loss and regret. Already at the beginning of the film each character is essentially washed up and looking to relive the past or reach some version of paradise, which is different for each character involved. Doc is a bit of a pervert if we’re being honest and it’s what gets him caught at the end of the film. He had dreams of traveling to Mexico, thrown away by his inability to leave a young girl dancing at a diner and that cost him his future. Dix dreams of buying back his family’s once great Kentucky horse farm, but ends up bleeding out in the same fields that he grew up in with horses grazing all around his corpse. Emmerich’s mistress Angela, essentially a cameo role by Marilyn Monroe, frequently talks of going to Cuba for a getaway on the beaches of the Caribbean. While Emmerich himself, in perhaps the darkest variation, seems to just want an end to the horse race of life. It’s mostly in the actor’s performance and the weariness suggested in his eyes, plus it’s in the way he asks the men he’s betrayed, “Why don’t you kill me?”- the performance says a lot. It’s that attitude, amongst all the criminality, that most connects it to the spirit of Noir storytelling.
There’s also a fun bit of trivia in that this is the second book by W. R. Burnett that John Huston adapted. The first was when he wrote the screenplay of High Sierra over drinks with longtime friend and collaborator Humphrey Bogart. That story also had more of a focus on the criminal element, with it leaning stylistically closer to the Gangster films of the 1930’s than most Noir films, but it helped mark an evolution in a genre that Hollywood was comfortable experimenting with. That story’s main character had several similarities to Dix Handley’s country boy history, notably with both characters searching to return to their own versions of paradise- though the idea is far better conceived here. Between dirty cops, some genuine bad luck, and a couple double-crosses, this film’s got it all. The pacing is expertly executed too. This is a standout Noir heist film, and I cannot recommend it enough!
Cameron Geiser is an avid consumer of films and books about filmmakers. He'll watch any film at least once, and can usually be spotted at the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan. He also writes about film over at www.spacecortezwrites.com.