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DVD The Asphalt Jungle
The dark urban world of The Asphalt Jungle is one of the essential destinations in film noir, but be warned: despite tough guy Sterling Hayden's dreams of bucolic escape, there is no way out. John Huston directed this superbly calibrated crime classic, which displays his usual wry appreciation of fringies and down-and-outers. This time the task for Huston's eccentric ensemble is a jewel robbery, which--this being a Huston film--can't possibly work out as well as its plan. The cast includes Sam Jaffee, indelible as a criminal mastermind, and the pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe. Hayden plays the kind of mug he would revisit in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, which is an informal homage to this film. And the film's look is definitive: both artful and gritty, it creates a noir landscape that traps its people just as surely as the tar pits trapped the dinosaurs. No wonder they call it noir. --Robert Horton
Far Far Beyond "A Classic Movie" (An Example Of Karma)
Someone here wrote that this movie is showing its age. Nothing is further from the truth. A movie like "Pulp Fiction" doesn't come close to this serious movie. This movie has "Pulp Fiction" beat all to hell because the plot is more real. The acting is at a MUCH higher level. It's the strong characterization developed by superbly executed acting in this movie that sets "The Asphalt Jungle" above movies like "Pulp Fiction". Every character in this movie was 'done in' by his/her own foibles. This, is an example of karma, an Eastern concept that was used in pulp crime movies of that era. John Huston conciously emphasized that concept, karma, in "The Asphalt Jungle". You will not finde a better "Crime Genre" film than this one.
Postwar classic, showing its age
'The Asphalt Jungle' is a seminal piece of post-war (1950) social realism which harks back to some of the more cosy clichés of the pre-war era. It focuses on the commission of a crime: Doc (Sam Jaffe) is freshly released from prison, a dapper, intelligent, little old bloke, and the man with the plan to carry out an audacious jewel robbery - he needs a team, and he needs finance for the operation. We watch the criminal underworld at work as the plan falls into place, the team assembles, and they set about this major theft, intent on changing their lives.
This is the stuff that dreams are made of - that one, big payday which will change your life. Only the criminal underworld has no honour, and there are double-crosses to worry about, and while get-rich-quick is the objective, the participants all have their own psychological conflicts and contradictions.
John Huston's film presents itself as a naturalistic, almost documentary account. He uses a linear, easy-to-follow narrative - no special effects, no flashbacks, just a simple storyline stripped to the basics. We follow the logic of Doc's plan, enter the lives of the players, understand their hopes and dreams, recognise their flaws. Shot in black and white, Huston employs a film noir style without pushing it to extremes - this is more grimy urban realism than noir. He creates an atmosphere of reality without it ever being truly authentic.
There are plenty of images of bleak, windswept, city streets - some anonymous urban sprawl of concrete and asphalt which contrasts with the dreams of all the participants. They want out, want sun, sea, rural tranquillity, somewhere they are not just rats in the race.
Significantly, there are no moral judgements made in the film. The financier of the scheme, Emmerich (Louis Calhern), is a corrupt lawyer with a sickly wife and an expensive mistress (Marilyn Monroe, making her debut). Dix (Sterling Hayden) is a big farm boy who simply wants enough money to get the family farm out of hock, and he has the muscle and gun to make sure nobody stands in his way. Doc (Jaffe received an Oscar nomination) is a nice little old bloke who surely deserves a quiet retirement because, after all, nobody's really going to get hurt in this caper?
And the policemen, meanwhile, are evidently quite capable of either blatant corruption or instrumental evasion of the law - they'll happily take bribes, they're unselfconsciously brutal and not averse to planting evidence. The audience is left to decide who are the bad guys and who are the good.
There is, however, one major moral question suggested without ever being directly posed. This is 1950, and huge sections of the audience will have been caught up in the war effort, either in uniform, in the factories, or waiting for loved ones to return. While British films of this era can make disparaging allusions to the wartime profiteers and black market criminals, 'The Asphalt Jungle' is coy on the subject. Except that Huston makes clear that all the criminals - and probably all the policemen - evaded wartime service because they were in prison, on the run, or unfit for the military.
Seen at the time as a gritty, 'hard-boiled' epic, it can appear a little coy by today's standards. Nevertheless, it presents an America stripped of glamour - Monroe's cameo role is the exception - a post-war society with no obvious direction or values, a city populated by people with obvious, materialistic concerns. This is a world in which the individual is alienated from society, a world where might is right, a world in which people can be allowed occasional acts of decency or humanity, but a world in which the individual is too flawed and too self-centred ever to be guided by moral principles.
The DVD offers acceptable picture quality - a bit aged and worn in places, a bit dated in others. The soundtrack, while mono, is crisp but unsophisticated. And there are some entertaining extras - a brief piece by Huston, a scholarly commentary, and cast reminiscences.
An entertaining film, a must-watch for students of the cinema or those fascinated by the crime genre, and a film which, though it will continue to date, has a gripping enough storyline to keep you engaged.
The Asphalt Jungle
Top-notch film noir and a tense mood piece loaded with furtive underworld figures in a gritty, urban atmosphere. Huston extracts top performances from the entire cast, in particular Calhern, Sam Jaffe and a young Sterling Hayden. Also look for an early Marilyn Monroe appearance as Calhern's child-like mistress.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"Build my gallows high, baby"--just one of the quintessentially noir sentiments expressed by Robert Mitchum in this classic of the genre. Mitchum, in absolute prime, sleepy-eyed form, relates a complicated flashback about getting hired by gangster Kirk Douglas to find femme fatale Jane Greer. The chain of film noir elements--love, money, lies--drags Mitchum into the lower depths. Director Jacques Tourneur gets the edgy negotiations between men and women as exactly right as he gets the inky shadows of the noir landscape (even the sunlit exteriors are fraught with doubt). This is Mitchum in excelsis, with his usual laid-back cool laced with great dialogue and tragic foreshadowing. As for his co-star, James Agee immortally opined that Jane Greer "can best be described, in an ancient idiom,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Mitchum - Jane Greer - Kirk Douglas Director(s): Jacques Tourneur DVD Release Date: Released the 06 July 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Stanley Kubrick's third feature, and first screen classic, is one of the great crime films of the 1950s. The Killing was written in collaboration with Jim Thompson, who penned pulp novels like The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me, and Pop. 1280, all of which were made into classic films. This time writing directly for the screen, Thompson joined with Kubrick to concoct a story about a desperate gang of lowlifes led by a grim, determined Sterling Hayden. Together they devise and execute a complex racetrack robbery, but inner tensions and the iron fist of fate work against them. The cast is uniformly superb, with Hayden, Jay C. Flippen, Timothy Carey, Marie Windsor, and Elisha Cook Jr. fleshing out characters torn between grandiose ambition and petty desire.... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sterling Hayden - Coleen Gray Director(s): Stanley Kubrick DVD Release Date: Released the 15 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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An amazingly effective film noir action movie, shot on location in New Orleans in 1950, that has twists of plot and explosions of violence that can still make audiences gasp. Elia Kazan, of all people, directed this story of a public health worker (Richard Widmark) and a police detective (Paul Douglas) who have only a few hours in which to capture some fleeing felons who may be infected with the plague. The bad guys are played, with enormous relish, by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, the latter only a few years before Kazan ratted him out to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In retrospect, this modest crime picture looks like a crucial turning point in the formation of Kazan's distinctive style, a clear precursor to the blistering location work of landmark films like On the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Widmark - Paul Douglas - Barbara Bel Geddes - Jack Palance Director(s): Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Alan Ladd is razor sharp as Raven, a contract killer who likes cats and kills witnesses. The first 15 minutes of this film is excellent noir. A hit man (Ladd) lives in a shabby hotel, when the smart mouthed maid enters to clean she slaps his kitten aside, prompting Ladd to knock her to the floor, tearing her dress. Ladd then proceeds to his first job in the film and on the way up the stairs en route to the apartment where his soon-to-be victim resides he encounters a girl in leg braces. Ladd is so good, as is the directing, we are not sure if he is going to retrieve the ball that has bounced out of her reach or blow her brains out with his Colt .32 pistol.
Also excellent is the photography, set between San Francisco and Los Angeles, many great shots include a gas works... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Veronica Lake - Alan Ladd Director(s): Frank Tuttle DVD Release Date: Released the 06 July 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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