Thursday, July 14

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

This film noir uses a little less flourish than others.  No music, except for the opening and closing sequences, with over a hundred minutes of soundtrack-silence.  No looming shadows, no thick clouds of smoke, no rooms lit by a single swaying light bulb.  Here, the devil is in the details.  Showing how all the pieces and players aligned to pull off a million dollar jewelry store heist, and the real difficult part, everyone cooperating afterward to divvy up the loot.  You might call this movie 'hard-boiled' because one of the main characters says things like "Why don't you quit crying and get me some bourbon?"  And that's to another man.

That line comes from Dix, the muscle of the caper, played by Sterling Hayden, who just might be one of the most badass, underrated character actors of all time.  He did play his fair share of leads, such as in a slightly similar film to this, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.  I heard an old interview from the 60's with Kubrick where the questioner thought he had seen The Killing but then when he started trying to talk about it, Kubrick politely corrected him that he was actually describing this film; Kubrick later re-used Hayden as the insane General Ripper in Dr Strangelove.  His appearances in film and television started to dwindle before his death in the 1980's but he'll remain known forever thanks to his part in The Godfather as Captain McCluskey.  After he breaks Al Pacino's nose, it's just a tense ticking clock until he gets his comeuppance right between the eyes.

Hayden stood six foot five, and Paramount allegedly called him "The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies" and "The Beautiful Blond Viking God."  He earned a Silver Star in WWII for his work with the OSS, operating a fishing boat of the coast of Yugoslavia as cover to scoop up downed allied pilots, and he used to claim he only kept up acting so he could afford to keep up sailing.  Sometimes the best actors are the ones who really seem to hate it.  Hayden is recruited by a brilliant tactician, Doc Riedenschneider, who has a meticulous planned robbery ready to go, he just needs the people who will actually be doing it.  He also has a safe-cracker, and a cat-loving, diner-owning, hunchback getaway driver played by James Whitmore, who is best known to anyone under the age of 75 as the old crook Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption.

Seeing Doc right from the beginning, seemingly out of his element, remain coolly in control of escalating crises is captivating.  Sam Jaffe plays Doc, a small bespectacled man with old world customs and manners to go with his German accent.  All the atmosphere sucks you in as well; it doesn't feel the studio backlot version of the criminal underworld.  The only police the that appear are at best mildly corrupt, and everybody uses slang that is most definitely dated, like 'You boned me!' when someone is disrespected.  More great atmosphere is provided by Marilyn Monroe, who appears very briefly as a gun moll.  This movie feels more like an earnest procedural than any kind of a character study or moral inquiry, but two scenes with Doc and Dix at a diner and a horse farm respectively go a long way to plumbing the depths of their characters in a short amount of time, and demonstrating that this film is concerned with more than just thrilling the audience with a exciting heist.

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