Synopsis
The City Under the City
Recently paroled from prison, legendary burglar "Doc" Riedenschneider, with funding from Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, gathers a small group of veteran criminals together in the Midwest for a big jewel heist.
1950 Directed by John Huston
Recently paroled from prison, legendary burglar "Doc" Riedenschneider, with funding from Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, gathers a small group of veteran criminals together in the Midwest for a big jewel heist.
La jungla de asfalto, Raubmord, Quand la ville dort, Giungla D'Asfalto, Mientras la ciudad duerme, 아스팔트 정글
I have so much to say about this multi-layered character driven drama disguised as a heist thriller but fuck all that only one thing really matters: WHERE WAS MARILYN MONROE WHY WAS SHE IN THIS FOR ONLY LIKE 19 SECONDS 😰😭🥺😍😖😫😩
Noir-November Challenge! Movie #7
A John Huston film disguised as a heist flick when its true strength is its character driven plot! Everything is seen from the point of view of the thugs or in this case hooligans!
You know it did its job well when I find myself openly rooting for the more sympathetic characters and shaking my clenched fist at the ones who truly had black hearts!
The ending was a real heartbreaker!
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.…
Based on the WR Burnett 1949 novel, and co-adapted and directed by John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle carefully establishes its characters as fundamentally impaired yet principally sympathetic, and it's this careful characterisation that's it's ultimate strength, especially in the latter half, which has the feeling of a downward spiral as the net gradually tightens on the various criminals. The movie accommodates a remarkable eleven-minute heist sequence with no accompanying musical score, and not only has a noteworthiness for instigating the heist genre but also stands as one of its greatest.
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…
Leave it to John Huston to turn jewel theft into an act of hope. Compared with the grim deeds populating Huston’s noir streets, it’s positively a saintly deed in comparison.
“Asphalt Jungle” slides right into Huston’s catalogue of morose people living in hopeless worlds.
Huston sought in “Jungle” to appropriate the vérité style of Italian neorealist works. Blended with stylized genre standards, Huston created a film that exists on the margins of our dreaded nightmares and also on the rim of our somber reality.
Where the neorealists took to the streets to place their films among the ruins of Europe post-WWII, Huston had no such ready-made set.
Instead, “Jungle” populated the pessimism of the American psyche — as its soldiers returned from defeating The Great Evil, and found themselves asking... what next? What happens when we are left only with the evil inside ourselves?
A film noir with a genuinely literary sweep—all of the characters here are dimensional and given their due, thanks to a script that shows great attention to detail. The performances are uniformly excellent, but it must be said that a 24 year-old, fresh-faced Marilyn Monroe wrenches your attention away from anything else in frame during her limited screentime. That moment when her eyes slowly open from a cat nap and look up at Louis Calhern is a special effect unto itself.
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 very solid noir heist with beautiful cinematography and snappy dialogue. There was a scene where a character talks about wanting to run over cats with his car that made me wish people still talked this way.
if every movie is a film noir for dogs does that mean they love every movie as much as i love film noir?
"The bullet just ripped through my side and went about its business."
Kind of a proto-The Killing, no? It even comes complete with Sterling Hayden (who turns in such a GREAT tough guy performance that I'm not even gonna make a joke about his character being named Dix Handley) and a crushing sense of impending doom. Seedy and shadowy as all hell. So utterly dark and grimy I had to clean my laptop screen afterwards.
Bank Robbery April #16
Heists are great. Noir cinematography is great. Marilyn Monroe is very attractive.
“If you want fresh air don’t look for it in this town.”
That teenage dance scene towards the end is viscerally uncomfortable in a way I didn’t expect from something like this. Sheesh! In fact the whole film has a disquieting atmosphere even more pernicious and encompassing than many other noirs I’ve seen, particularly for one with such a precise, multi-faceted robbery involved.
“You big boys. What have you got? Fronts. Nothing but fronts. And when that slips...”
What a way to finish too. Horses and men; makes sense every time.
A perfect example of why I love classic movies. The tough guy one liners that are totally phony on the page but feel absolutely genuine on the screen, the beautiful femme fatales who knock you dead with just a look (I mean for gods sake there’s no wonder why Monroe is such an icon), and it’s an absolute masterclass in minimalist blocking. Every decision feels so purposeful, it’s so lean and mean, a perfect balance of crime and criminal, I absolutely love it
Watched on tcm
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.…
Everything to love about classic film noir in a neat package. The dated elements (general sexist bull shit) are packaged in such a way that it just kind of comes across as ironic and slightly humorous in a modern context. Huston really knows how to elevate a script with blocking and bringing out interesting nuances in his actors that consistently feels more aligned with modern acting. This was a slow burn, which resulted in a crime film that felt methodical and professional in its setup, execution, and ultimate downfall. Very nice
Relato de unos personajes tan perdedores como llenos de carisma, muy bien tratados y desarrollados. Te enganchas por ellos, sobre todo. Huston te mantiene pegado a la pantalla con un magnífico ritmo narrativo. Me ha gustado mucho.
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