John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

We’ve said before that critics claim that film noir is not a genre, but a style – that you can have a noir-ist western or a noir-ist science fiction film or a noir-ist crime drama, but that a film is rarely just a film noir. Tonight’s movie is a good example of this. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle makes most critics’ top 10 film noir lists because it has so many of the conventions we’ve come to associate with the style – a dark, urban filmscape, a corrupt, amoral world, a deep feeling of paranoia and alienation, a pervasive sense of guilt and despair. You can see this (or feel it because it is as much a mood as a visual style) from the very beginning of the film.

Foster Hirsch writes in his book, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, that “The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.” Well, you might ask, does a city in any movie ever care about the humans that live in it?

Sure. Watch Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all the buildings seem friendly, built to happily serve and contain the needs and desires of the protagonist. (The irony in Truman is that they are built to make Truman happy, but that’s another story.) Or check out Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the city in which Sam Lowry lives and works seems to take a malicious glee in making his life difficult. It may not be friendly, but it has personality. The point is that film-makers endow settings with character just as much as they do the people in a movie. And in film noir the depiction of the city sets a definite mood.

So, The Asphalt Jungle is noirist, but a noirist what? The genre here is heist. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man or The Thomas Crown Affair or The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven, you’ve seen a heist film. Essentially, the plot revolves around the elaborate plan and execution of a robbery. We would further separate the heist film from the con film in that the robbery involves defeating a challenging technical anti-theft apparatus, like a impenetrable bank vault with a flawless time-lock or an alarm system with random roving electric eyes, whereas a con film focuses on an elaborate deception that results in people willingly parting with something valuable (think The Sting or The Grifters).

In The Asphalt Jungle, a group of criminals led by a “mastermind” plan a jewelry heist. One of the conventions of a heist film is that the robbery itself comprises a significant part of the movie – here it is 11 minutes long. Another important convention is the complication. Few heists go according to plan, and often participants plan to double-cross one another or something causes the plan to unravel. This is one of the joys of the genre – what does the unraveling reveal in terms of character? What storytelling trick will surprise us with unexpected exposition or resolution? What suspense will result from improvising on a meticulously pre-conceived plan?

Heist movies also offer one of film’s most delicious ironies – a plot that often makes you root for the criminal element of society. This is especially hard in a noir film where people aren’t especially likable, but it is an interesting element in human nature that we tend to root for humans to succeed at difficult tasks, even if the task in question is a robbery. Why do you suppose that is? Anyway, we hope you enjoy tonight’s film noir heist film as both a remarkable example of a genre and a style

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser