The Asphalt Jungle (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 14) I did a marathon of three films on Turner Classic Movies, which was doing a night of “caper films.” “Caper films” are a sort of sub-genre of crime movies that deal with the careful planning and execution of a single crime, usually a large-scale burglary or robbery of cash, furs or jewels, and the internal conflicts within the gang that send the careful plan awry. The sequence I watched last night opened with the granddaddy of all “caper films,” The Asphalt Jungle (1950), based on a novel by W. R. Burnett and directed by John Huston from a script he co-wrote with Ben Maddow. Huston once said that three movies based on Burnett’s works, each made a decade apart from each other – Little Caesar (1930), High Sierra (1940) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950) – had essentially redefined crime pictures, and Huston had been involved in the last two, as writer of High Sierra and director and co-writer of The Asphalt Jungle. The plot of The Asphalt Jungle revolves around various people who come together to burglarize the Belletiers jewelry store and steal the $1 million in jewels in their inventory. The plan was hatched years before by “Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe, 13 years after he played the High Lama in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon), who noticed a weak spot in the tunneling under the store and figured a crew could use it to break in. But he needs $50,000 in seed capital to carry out the crime and thinks he can get it from crooked attorney and fixer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern).

Only Emmerich is broke because, though he’s married to May (Dorothy Tree), he’s keeping a mistress on the side: Angela Phinlay (Marilyn Monroe, who up to this point had had a middling career in roles that didn’t require her to do anything but stand around and look pretty; The Asphalt Jungle was her first film that actually required her to act). The catalyst for the crime scheme is Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), who’s just been released from prison and is living with his pre-incarceration girlfriend, Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen in quite a remarkable performance totally unlike her best-known role as the egomaniac but untalented diva of Singin’ in the Rain). He grew up on a farm in Kentucky but lost it after his father died and he was unable to pay the taxes on the land, and this led him to the big city and to a life of crime. Dix owes money to bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence), whose parlor stays in business because of a corrupt police officer, Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley), whom he’s bribing. The other conspirators include Gus Minissi (James Whitmore), a getaway driver, and safecracker Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), who in one of the film’s many unusual points is depicted as a devoted family man, married to Maria (Teresa Celli) and with two kids about whom he genuinely cares. The robbery goes off as planned except that the explosion from Louis’s blowing open the store’s safe sets off every burglar alarm in the area. The aftermath isn’t so good for the crooks: all along Emmerich has plotted to double-cross them and steal the swag for himself, then use it to get away to South America with Angela. Stuck with a whole lot of “hot rocks” they can’t turn into liquid cash, the crooks fall out among each other. Emmerich murders Bob Brannom (Brad Dexter), a private detective he was using as a collection agent, and ultimately the police, led by Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire), solve the crime after Cobby is “persuaded” to turn state’s evidence and Angela, browbeaten by detectives, changes her story that Emmerich was with her the night of the robbery so the cops won’t arrest her for giving him a false alibi.

The Asphalt Jungle is generally classified as film noir, though it qualifies only tangentially; Huston and his cinematographer, veteran MGM hand Harold Rosson (who shot The Wizard of Oz, an assignment that clearly turned him on more than filming a black-and-white crime drama set in grungy locales), include only a few of the shadowy chiaroscuro shots typical of noir. And there isn’t a femme fatale, either (though if Marilyn Monroe’s character had been played as one, an already great film might have been even greater). What seems most contemporary about The Asphalt Jungle is the moral complexity of the characters; this, more than any other, is the film that set the template for later crime dramas in which the criminals had some sympathetic qualities while the police were depicted as ineffective and/or corrupt. And I love the way it ends; Riedenschneider gets arrested because he stops in a local joint to watch a young woman dance, and that delays his getaway by a crucial three minutes. Dix, mortally wounded in a shoot-out, gets Doll to buy him a car so he can drive out to the old Kentucky farm. Along the way Doll stops at the office of small-town physician Dr. Swanson (John Maxwell) to get Dix medical attention, only he bolts and rips out his IV (held not by a mechanical device but by a human being!) when he realizes Swanson is going to fulfill his legal obligation to report a gunshot wound to the police. He finally makes it to his old farm – and collapses and falls dead. Though it’s an obvious invocation of the old “city bad, country good” movie cliché, it’s an ending that works in its own right and a powerful conclusion of a very interesting and quite compelling film.