The Asphalt Jungle
Short description
John Huston directed this crime drama, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in May 1950 and running 113 minutes. The screenplay, written by Huston with Ben Maddow, follows Doc Riedenschneider, a veteran safecracker just out of prison with a plan for a large jewellery robbery. A crooked lawyer, Alonzo Emmerich, puts up the money, and Doc assembles a crew around the strong-arm man Dix Handley, the driver Gus Minissi and a safecracker. The theft itself goes according to plan, but the men's own weaknesses and the pressure closing in around them turn the aftermath into a fight to stay alive.
The film sits fourth among the twenty-two features Huston directed, arriving between Key Largo in 1948 and The African Queen in 1952, and it belongs to the run of taut, low-lit crime pictures that shaped his early reputation. Sterling Hayden plays Dix, Louis Calhern plays Emmerich, and Sam Jaffe plays Doc, heading a credited cast of seventy-three that also includes Jean Hagen, James Whitmore and John McIntire.
Made for about a million dollars, the film has held up well with viewers: on IMDb it rates 7.8 from more than twenty-nine thousand votes, and on TMDB 7.5 from several hundred. A critics' rating of 8.4 from forty reviews places it above both audience scores, suggesting reviewers hold it in higher regard than the general public does.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on the novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
- A tiny role in the film was played by the up-and-coming actress Marilyn Monroe. Her name appeared at the very end of the cast list in the credits, but due to Monroe’s subsequent fame, she consistently appeared on the cover when the film was released on VHS and DVD, almost as the main “star” of the film.
- The opening and closing scenes of the film have become a cornerstone of American cinema. The film, a pioneer of the heist genre, served as a model for Jacques Dassen’s *Rififi* (1955) and Stanley Kubrick’s *The Killing* (1956). Film historians find traces of its influence even in the works of Quentin Tarantino, including *Reservoir Dogs* (1991) and *Pulp Fiction* (1994).
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