The Asphalt Jungle

theshrillest3.5

this mf's name is "dix handley" lmao

Justin Peterson3.5

Criterion Collection Spine #847"People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. And that goes on 24 hours a day, every day in the year ... But suppose we had no police force, good or bad. Suppose we had ... just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished. The jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over."I was going to tease that this was just the American remake of 'Rififi', but it might be the other way around since this came out 5 years earlier. The Asphalt Jungle is pretty much your standard heist flick, but I suppose it should be given credit for being one of the early entries in the genre with great performances, and the underlining theme that crime just does not pay.I liked seeing Sterling Hayden in this playing yet another one of his on edge characters. Also, I was excited to see Marilyn Monroe, but while lovely, she was not quite the blonde bombshell yet that made my jaw drop when I first saw her in 'Some Like It Hot'. Overall it was neat to see the heist play out, and get an insight into the intentions of all those involved. But these are bad dudes, so it ends up playing out as you would expect. "Don't bone me! ... Now, look, I'm not boning you ... Did I ever welsh ... Nobody said you did ... You just boned me!"Thanks for reading.Happy movie watching ... Skål!🍻

Rocky🕵️🎞️3.5

If your name is Dix Handley there's 1% chance you'll live a normal life.Textbook crime film where you already know it’s going to fall apart… the only question is how ugly the collapse will be. Jewel heist story. A bunch of guys get together, each one with a “skill”—the planner, the muscle, the driver, the safecracker—and they try to execute what looks like an almost professional job. But it's more about these guys quietly sabotaging themselves without even trying that hard. Everyone’s got a weak spot, and the film waits for those cracks to widen. Huston shoots it with a very cold look, it's a well made film. Even when they’re talking big or planning carefully, the world they’re operating in doesn’t care about their ambition. It’s not judgmental exactly, just indifferent. And that makes it worse for them. You can see the DNA of basically every heist movie that came after it—right down to the “assemble the team” that later shows up everywhere. Except that it's more fragile. Less like a blueprint for success, more like a detailed instruction manual for failure. The characters are driven by their weaknesses. Doc wants control and to do things in a clean way, even though he’s in a dirty world. Dix is stuck in the past, trying to go back to a life that’s already gone. Emmerich is just greedy and corrupt, pretending to be respectable. Even the smaller characters are stuck in their own problems... money, desire, or just bad luck. That's where Huston punches you -- no one gets punished. It’s not some grand moral justice. Instead, everything goes wrong in ordinary ways. A distraction here, bad luck there, someone waiting just a few seconds too long. The robbery slowly comes undone bit by bit. A bit sad as well, especially with Dix. Hayden, constantly thinking about somewhere else... Kentucky, horses, an older version of himself that might not have even existed the way he remembers it. That longing doesn’t save him; it just makes his decisions more predictable in a tragic way.The city never sleeps and the criminals mostly destroy themselves before anyone else has to finish the job. It’s funny how influential it became, because it doesn’t feel like a movie showing off or trying to be influential... more like a warning that doesn’t care whether you listen or not. well shot and directed, more than anything. Doc watching kids dance to Hayden running what an ending! I need to rewatch Maltese Falcon. (Was thinking that they really had some Marilyn Monroe lookalikes back then, but turned out it was actually her. She's stuck hooking up with a creepy lawyer pretending to be his niece as an alibi. Interesting that it got past the Hays Code, because the first half is disturbingly incestuous and the year was 1950. Huston's first choice for Angela was Lola Albright. And this needed more of Jean Hagen, she was amazing!)