The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

John Huston has always been the advocate of character and situation rather than over-stylization of cinema. Huston himself has the element of the rogue adventurer about him: leaving America for Europe to study art after an already colourful childhood, then later joining the Mexican Cavalry, where he developed his talents as a writer, and then in time, back to America and Hollywood as a scriptwriter and later director.

Of his varied body of work (of which one only has to look at Escape to Victory to see how varied!), the one film of his I most admire is this one. This is a film noir with a decidedly more gritty edge - Huston himself was a pioneer of the genre with The Maltese Falcon - but this time imbued with a kind of neo-realism that was influenced by the European movement of the time, especially Italy and France. 

The protagonists in this film are those who would normally (up until then) be considered the antagonists: crooks, racketeers and general reprobates. Their leader and chief coordinator is as far removed from a Sydney Greenstreet type as could be imagined: the little sage-like ex-convict "Doc" Riedenschneider (veteran Sam Jaffe), newly released but with a wily, careful plan for stealing diamonds with the right men, his mantra being that "crime is a form of left-handed endeavour." His chief soldier in the operation is Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley, a tough guy but with his heart in the right place, who has never had the lucky breaks. Further down the league table of dishonourable mention in this gang come Anthony Mancuso, James Whitmore, Marc Lawrence, and Louis Calhern as the slimy distinguished lawyer Alonzo Emmerich financing the operation, his chief weakness being his 'niece' Angela Phinlay, played in hauntingly sensual fashion by the one and only Marilyn Monroe, whom Huston shrewdly cast in her first major dramatic role.

Also just as haunting though less glamorous of course than Marilyn, is "Doll", Dix's girlfriend, poignantly unable to control her eyelashes under the tears of personal strife (another brilliant character touch by Huston), and played by the excellent character star Jean Hagen, later to gain cinematic immortality as the squeaky-voiced silent movie star of Singin' in the Rain.

The law enforcement as such in this caper - what would be considered in old Hollywood as the necessary moral backbone - is pretty much in the sidelines.  As the persevering crooks go their separate ways however, and the ensuing, almost inevitable double crossing starts, the Law gradually closes in on them, and the world-weary police chief (John McIntire), has the perfect riposte, as he switches on the various police radios that are constantly in operation around the city:

"We send police assistance to every one of those calls, cos they're not just code numbers on a radio beam, they're cries for help! People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped! That goes on 24 hours of the day, every day in the year, and that's not exceptional, that's usual, it's the same in every city of the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad? Suppose we had...[turns off the radios]...just silence? Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished, the jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over. Think about it."