I have to admit that I was a bit predisposed to like this movie, I might say even giddy. It stars Sterling Hayden, and he plays two of my favourite characters in two of my favourite films; The Killing, and Dr. Strangelove. While it could be argued, successfully, that he plays the same character every time, I don’t really care. I just love his no nonsense tough guy delivery. Probably even more than James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart.

The first thing that struck me was the absence of score. Beyond the opening, there is none. The second thing that struck me was the sumptuous cinematography. This is a master plying his trade. This is the best looking and photographed Noir…

The Asphalt Jungle is a very harsh noir drama that describes in minute detail a jewelry heist and the subsequent double games between the participants. It is remarkable for the psychological analysis of the characters and for the realistic description of the environment of the urban underworld. John Huston realizes a story of greed, paranoia and bad luck, wrapped in the night of an alienating and corrupt metropolis. Central part of the plot, the city is represented as an oppressive space that nullifies any desire to escape and prevents the protagonists' dreams from materializing. In addition to Huston's talent, the great result of the film is due to the quality of the novel from which it is based. William R.…

John Huston's heist noir is grittier than his Maltese Falcon, with Louis Calhern as the respectable criminal who is messing around with a slinky Marilyn Monroe and living on the brink of bankruptcy.

There's a jewellery robbery, a crooked private detective, a cripple, a couple of seedy convicts, and a double cross. It's all standard fare for the genre bit it's so dirty you need to wash your hands when you've seen it.

Small pleasures - Sterling Hayden's thug playing the heavy with his team, playing it soft with his girl Jean Hagen; James Whitmore setting up meetings; Sam Jaffe as the dapper mastermind; Monroe's stretching; Calhern's fop playing cards when his butler calls.

In the jungle no one is…

Fêted film noir from John Huston. One of the earliest to be based around a heist and as such a major influence on Kubrick's The Killing a few years down the line. In casting The Killing, Kubrick picked actors who impressed him from the noirs he liked, prompting him to bring back Sterling Hayden, who is the central protagonist in The Asphalt Jungle, for his own film.

In comparing the two, I think Huston, as one of the genre's originators and masters, still has the edge on the apprentice. The Asphalt Jungle, unencumbered with voiceovers or bombastic musical cues, is a sinewy, economical noir that eschews fancy camerawork for more static shots, where the action often occurs within the set…

62/100

Another semi-casualty (I do still like it) of my taste gradually evolving away from movies that are 95% plot. Hard to miss the theme, of course—Huston might as well have written it out in big flashing letters, Noé-style: LE HASARD DÉTRUIT TOUT—and Sam Jaffe's jukebox scene near the end encapsulates it beautifully (while also providing a proto-R&B erotic charge that even Marilyn Monroe* can't match). Other than that, though, spikes on the emotional EKG are few and far between; the two most poignant moments—Jean Hagen's heartbreakingly hopeful expression when Dix calls Doll back after she leaves his apartment, and Emmerich's wife hastily brushing her hair when she hears him returning to finish their card game—both involve women who are…

When it comes to the heist films foundations in cinema, is the case of always either Dassin’s Rififi or Kubrick’s The Killing being cited as the top pears. But as history tends to be unfair with the real brilliant minds of big creations, the main creator and exponentiator of such integral genre of cinema’s line of greatest strands of entertainment was mister John Huston himself when he made here The Asphalt Jungle. When he got to adapt W. R. Burnett’s novel into film, things could’ve gone easily into the path of his other works adapted into movie, especially in the crime/Noir genre like Nobody Lives Forever or Walsh’s High Sierra (which Huston scripted).

But Huston reinvents his own brand of…

John Huston seriously altered the standards of crime films with The Asphalt Jungle. Shadows and seediness aren't the main attraction here. This is pure human drama with an unyielding fatalism driving the story. Every second is character driven. Every plot point is cause-and-effect. There's no invisible hand guiding this. These men and women set everything in motion themselves. Their personalities are screaming at you. They're confessing their strengths and weaknesses with every line of dialogue. Whether victory or doom, we know it's all in their hands.

Our criminals don't fit their predisposed prototypes. Dix is certainly rough and hot-tempered, but he detests his work. His monologue about one day returning to his old horse ranch is beautiful in its child-like…

A legendary burglar gets out of prison and heads to Cincinnati where he hopes to find funding for a new heist. The plan is to rob a jewelry store and trade the diamonds for cash but there's one problem after another.

Many people consider John Huston's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE to be the quintessential crime picture and it's easy to see why. This is certainly a great picture that has pretty much everything you'd want in a crime picture. You've got a gritty cast of characters, an intelligent screenplay and an all around feeling of the law quickly closing in around you. Huston wasn't a stranger to crime pictures and his writing and directing certainly puts this one over the top.…