THE ASPHALT JUNGLE is an unusually lean and well-structured heist film, remarkable for its depth of characterization. Crime here is portrayed with a realism very unusual for Hollywood -- as a business, run by ordinary people. These thugs and crooks have loved ones and families, backstories and lives like anyone else. The writing, direction, and cast are uniformly outstanding. I've never seen a crime picture that portrayed the relationships between its characters so deeply and effectively.
The film avoids traps most films of this type fall into: glamorizing the criminals or making them seem super-human. There are no diabolical geniuses here, just crooks, some smarter, some dumber. The speech at the end about the police probably draws laughs from some cynical modern viewers, but I would say it gives an enriching moral dimension to the story. The story walks a very fine line, allowing one to sympathize with the crooks' human qualities and vulnerabilities while not encouraging sympathy for their predatory activities.
THE ASPHALT JUNGLE is vastly superior to the gory, nihilistic neo-noirs of today, where ruthless killers are portrayed just because -- well, because ruthless killers are "sexy" projections of our discreditable human impulse to live free of conscience, scruples, or remorse ... and because shock and blood are easy ways to keep restless audiences in their seats.
The violence in the film is discreetly handled, yet much more effective than the buckets of blood directors resort to nowadays. Filmmakers in the 1950s may have wished they could portray violence more frankly, but now that the net is down, we can see explicitness doesn't make violence more realistic. The modern approach to violence actually distracts the audience from the story and characters. Either they're distracted by repulsion -- ick!, nervous laughter -- ha ha! -- or they're distracted by evaluating the special effects. How did they make that guy's face look blown-off? Prosthetics? CGI? It sounds old-fashioned to say it, but no on screen violence can match in realism what audiences imagine off-screen. I hope the current gore-fest approach will go out of fashion soon. Grand Guignol is the opposite of realism, provoking laughter more often than fright. Watching SWEENEY TODD in the theatre recently was interesting -- while the film is in no sense realistic, the over-the-top bloody scenes elicited yawns and groans from some in the hip young audience. Even hipsters seem to be growing tired of Grand Guignol at this point.
This is truly a fascinating noir masterpiece and that rare thing, a genuine ensemble movie that works on every level. There is no definite protagonist, just a group of crooks who pull a daring burglary, then a group of cops who hunt them down. The protagonist is the unnamed city itself, where the police struggle endlessly to control the crooks, including the ones in their own ranks. The tone is cold and fairly bleak, but never nihilistic in the modern fashion.
The ending, where Sterling Hayden dies in a field on the farm where he grew up, as curious horses sniff at him, is both predictable and unexpectedly moving. A real stroke of poetry, standing for the way we all fail to live up to our youthful dreams and the futility of the dream we all have sometimes of returning to a lost innocence.
The film avoids traps most films of this type fall into: glamorizing the criminals or making them seem super-human. There are no diabolical geniuses here, just crooks, some smarter, some dumber. The speech at the end about the police probably draws laughs from some cynical modern viewers, but I would say it gives an enriching moral dimension to the story. The story walks a very fine line, allowing one to sympathize with the crooks' human qualities and vulnerabilities while not encouraging sympathy for their predatory activities.
THE ASPHALT JUNGLE is vastly superior to the gory, nihilistic neo-noirs of today, where ruthless killers are portrayed just because -- well, because ruthless killers are "sexy" projections of our discreditable human impulse to live free of conscience, scruples, or remorse ... and because shock and blood are easy ways to keep restless audiences in their seats.
The violence in the film is discreetly handled, yet much more effective than the buckets of blood directors resort to nowadays. Filmmakers in the 1950s may have wished they could portray violence more frankly, but now that the net is down, we can see explicitness doesn't make violence more realistic. The modern approach to violence actually distracts the audience from the story and characters. Either they're distracted by repulsion -- ick!, nervous laughter -- ha ha! -- or they're distracted by evaluating the special effects. How did they make that guy's face look blown-off? Prosthetics? CGI? It sounds old-fashioned to say it, but no on screen violence can match in realism what audiences imagine off-screen. I hope the current gore-fest approach will go out of fashion soon. Grand Guignol is the opposite of realism, provoking laughter more often than fright. Watching SWEENEY TODD in the theatre recently was interesting -- while the film is in no sense realistic, the over-the-top bloody scenes elicited yawns and groans from some in the hip young audience. Even hipsters seem to be growing tired of Grand Guignol at this point.
This is truly a fascinating noir masterpiece and that rare thing, a genuine ensemble movie that works on every level. There is no definite protagonist, just a group of crooks who pull a daring burglary, then a group of cops who hunt them down. The protagonist is the unnamed city itself, where the police struggle endlessly to control the crooks, including the ones in their own ranks. The tone is cold and fairly bleak, but never nihilistic in the modern fashion.
The ending, where Sterling Hayden dies in a field on the farm where he grew up, as curious horses sniff at him, is both predictable and unexpectedly moving. A real stroke of poetry, standing for the way we all fail to live up to our youthful dreams and the futility of the dream we all have sometimes of returning to a lost innocence.