7th
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Screenhogging giants (Sterling Hayden leads) reach for greatness and fail, miserably and totally, for want of common sense. It’s a gas to watch, so long as you get off on suffering. The film – a robbery picture, where the theft comes off but the crooks are burned – is a downward sloping work from the very start. “Every man works for his vice” a bookie drunk observes early on. True indeed – we all work secretly for those things that will wear us down – but while some in the real world have made this vice jockeying work, in John Huston land there are no happy endings for hard fighting men. Grand tragedies of this sort, where the fall is predicted by the nature of the players, can be highly satisfying to a certain kind of sad sack audience, or just shocking and amusing to a genre audience struck unawares by the “serious” nature of the picture they’ve been suckered into seeing, but for the rest of us they are in general just a little sad, and a little too long. The first half of the film, building up towards a jewel robbery, is quite taut and watchable. A loose gang of hoods – an old con just out of the klink, a high profile attorney in need of fast cash, and a motley chorus of small, petty crooks with small, petty dreams – joins together to orchestrate a big score; we’re told just how big (the biggest job ever in the middle west!) but the shop talk means, as it does in so many crime pictures, very little to us. We’re impressed with the men’s ambition, but when pressed could care less about how well this heist will stack up against others at the next Mid Western Jewel Thieves Union meeting. But the enthusiasm of the men infects us, and the slow reveal of their individual personal failings (one is a pedophile, another a drunk, a third (the most likeable) a broken boy with chips littering his shoulders) is a fun counting game – “we know what will undo him, but what about him?” Once the actual robbery is attempted and accomplished, however, we’re left only with the long, slow descent, as one by one each player self-destructs and falls, wax wings flapping, into the void. The final few moments of the film, showing Hayden half dead in a field of horses, is beautiful and poignant, and redeems the film in some small part from the torpor and boredom of the preceding forty minutes. Recommended, overall. Screen this along with Ocean’s Thirteen and Dog Day Afternoon for a strong weekend overview of the progression of morality and honor among thieves in American cinema.
(Marilyn Monroe appears for all of ten minutes as the attorney’s slinky squeeze, and spends nine of those ten attempting to wake up, with a luxurious lack of hurry, from an off-screen catnap. Wonderful.)
