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THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (John Huston) 1950 The streets of Huston's Midwest city (perhaps Cincinnati) where "The
Asphalt Jungle" is set are remarkably
empty. While most of the picture takes place inside its buildings, the
exteriors give the appearance of confinement and decay, a war zone of sorts, not
unlike Italy's post-war neo-realist films. (1) The opening shots show men
diminished and alienated by their surroundings. The building next to the
diner Dix Handley enters is aptly named Pilgrim House (2). Film noir is often populated by characters driven by forces the viewer is
not privy to. We expect that thieves rob banks and knock over jewelry
stores because of greed. But this is usually not the motivation in the
noir films. In "Gun Crazy" for example, Annie and Bart are hard
working and indefatigable, in many ways like the ideal American couple if you
forget that their chosen profession is robbing banks. It's what they
do. They may never achieve the American dream, but it's a job of work. John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle," made the same year as
"Gun Crazy," shows much the same ethic at work: a group of
men who knows no other profession plans and executes a jewelry heist. They
are professionals. It's clear early on that they are not money
grubbers out to get rich. They will do what it takes to get enough to feed
their habits. Their bad habits. Their leader Doc
Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) wants nothing more than to get to Mexico and do
nothing but ogle young girls. Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) is a safe
cracker; he needs the money to take care of his wife and a sickly child.
The driver Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) runs a low-class diner, he likes cats,
and he won't squeal on anyone. We're never quite sure what makes him tick,
only that he hates the cops and is loyal to ex-cons. Then there's Dix
Handley (Sterling Hayden), a hooligan, the "muscle," an enforcer with a
weakness for the horses. What these men have in common is a deep
distrust of authority, the establishment if you will, since society has
done nothing for them. They become what Godard would later call a
band of outsiders. Huston's lighting of the scene where they plan the
robbery encapsulates them to the exclusion of all others (3). These men inhabit the city's lower depths under the asphalt pavement. Yet these four criminals all have a moral creed of sorts:
they will not double cross one another; they will accept their
agreed-upon payment; they look out for one another; they do not regard
money as a good in and of itself. This last tenet--their attitude toward money--is what separates
these men from those who finance their caper, especially "Cobby" (Marc Lawrence), a small-time bookie with
access to both the police and the moneyed people. "Money makes me
sweat (4)." He arranges
financial backing from Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), a corrupt lawyer who
agrees to finance Riedenschneider's jewelry heist. The only problem--Emmerich is broke. His plan is to double cross the Doc, take the jewels
and start a new life by abandoning his invalid wife and go to some foreign
country with his mistress Angela (Marilyn Monroe) (5). "The Asphalt Jungle" is an ensemble piece with no one character monopolizing the screen,
though the story begins and ends with Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). We're
unsure of Dix's motives.
He comes from Kentucky where his family owned
horses. Crop failure and his father's death resulted in the loss of the
family farm. We can assume that like so many rural youth in the Depression
he gravitated to the city. At one point he says he wants to make one
killing and get back to his farm, take a bath in the creek and get the city dirt
off him. His face lights up when he talks about his farm and the
horses (6). He's became a petty
criminal, and as the movie opens we see him dodging the police after a
small-time robbery. Despite his size, he's a diminished figure, overpowered by the expanse of asphalt and
steel (7). Huston and screenwriter Ben Maddow--who wrote the script from the novel by W.R.
Burnett--have imbued him with a humanity that is crucial to the story. At
the same time we're given the sense that society itself has let this happen, a
fatalistic view shared by most noirs. This fatalism is reinforced by the use of vertical and horizontal
lines--stripes and bars, a recurrent noir motif, usually showing entrapment or
helplessness. Several characters in "The Asphalt Jungle"
wear striped clothing or are surrounded by vertical blinds or elongated
shadows. Huston, however, uses this device not only to show a kind of
imprisonment but also to contrast individuals. For example, we first see Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) in his striped
pajamas, his wife in bed behind her own bars (8). At first he turns down
the chance to be Doc's safe cracker, until he hears his sickly son's cry in the
next room. The money will get the boy proper medical care. His
predicament is in sharp contrast to that of the lawyer Emmerich who is broke and
in desperate need of money. He's often seen in natty pin strips
encased by Venetian blinds (9). It isn't long before we begin to sense that the four robbers
are, if not sympathetic, at least human with many of the problems shared
by ordinary people who struggle to make a living. This humanity--especially Dix's, but also that of the other three
robbers--is in stark contrast to the other characters in the story.
This includes not only Emmerich and "Cobby" but also the
police. We might say especially the police, from the sanctimonious
Police Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire) to the corrupt Detective Lieutenant
Ditrich (Barry Kelley). Hardy's primary objective is good press,
his method to paint the criminal as "the predatory
beast." He singles out Dix Handley as "a hardened
killer," "a man without human feeling or human
mercy." The trouble with this assessment is that we've spent
the entire movie watching Dix. We've seen his face soften when
he's with "Doll" (Jean Hagen); when he refuses Doc's offer of
the jewels, instead "loaning" him a thousand dollars so he can
get out of the country. Dix's Achilles heel is an obsession with horses: he bets
heavily, and pays for his addiction by knocking over small businesses. As
in so many noirs of the 40s and 50s, the past has a way of taking hold
of a protagonist and dragging him inexorably to his doom. Dix's
obsession with his Kentucky roots, his inability to realize that his
past is lost, is his undoing. Like so many noir protagonists, he's looking for that one big job that will get
him back to his roots, get him back to Kentucky horse country. Huston
never asks us to approve of Dix or the others, only to observe them and
draw our own conclusions. There are four women in this story: Emmerich's house-bound wife, his
mistress, Ciavelli's wife, and Doll, Dix's friend. How they are treated by
the men is instructive: only Dix and Ciavelli are decent, the latter
putting his wife and son above all else. We may think that Dix treats Doll
rather badly, but she clearly loves him, and does not feel the need to gussy
herself up for him, even to the point of removing her false eyelashes in front of
him (10). The last few minutes of "The Asphalt Jungle" are set far away
from the city. Dix and Doll are on the run. He's bleeding, yet his
obsession to get back to his farm overcomes any pain. In this final
sequence Houston first shows us the ubiquitous white picket fences of Kentucky's
horse country (11), Dix's Garden of Eden. We see Dix and Doll inside the
car in a two shot (12), but only for a few seconds. As Dix's dementia
takes over, they are pictured in separate shots (13), never sharing the
frame. Dix has abandoned the present--he's back in his youth. Doll
has lost him, and she knows it (14). He gets to the farm, stumbles toward some horses grazing in the field,
falls and dies. The horses approach and in the last close-up (15) Dix is
finally among his beloved horses. Huston chooses his last shot with
care: an idyllic scene except for the body among the horses (16) (17).
This final shot contains a wrenching irony: Dix has achieved what he
wished for. But we, the spectator, wish it also. We look at that
breathtaking scenery and try to will that body away. Some critics have written that the final scene involving Dix and Doll betrays
a sentimentality that softens the edge a good film noir should possess. I
disagree, primarily because Dix's inherent humanity is central to the story.
Dix's
weakness for the horses, his attempt at the end of the film to get back to
his rural roots, effectively underlines many of the problems of displacement that
affected so many in post-war America. Back to the Noir Page. click stills for larger versions
a commentary by Tony McRae
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