The Asphalt Jungle

Tags

Jean Hagen, Marilyn Monroe, Sterling Hayden

Was John Huston one of the great Hollywood auteurs, along with Ford, Hawks, Capra, Wellman, Welles, deMille, Chaplin, Hitchcock etc? His virtues include the fact that you know you will get a good script, such as the one for this film – 112 minutes of deft plotting, and good character development where no one does something stupid or out of character just to advance the action. The direction is fairly functional, without the visual grandeur of a Ford or the penetrating camera moves of Welles or Hitchcock; in fact the few showy camera angles, such as the those high-angle shots on the stair landing of Emmerich’s house looking down to the ground-floor hall, look a bit garish.

You also tend to get fine performances and in “the Asphalt Jungle”, without any major stars, the acting and casting is superb. Louis Calhern is outwardly a pillar of the community but you can sense that he is not quite as solid or assured as he appears. Of course, he makes the fatal error that leads to the unravelling of the heist because he does not remove the identifying objects from Brannom’s corpse – such as his wallet, client list etc – and he dumps it in a place where it washes ashore very quickly.

Sam Jaffe is stiff and pernickety as Doc, astute, wary and careful about every move he makes. The major honours go to Sterling Hayden, an intense coiled spring of a man, burning with a sense of injustice at the world. Huston captures all this. Perhaps it fed into Hayden’s perception of who he was: the loner, the outsider trapped in the system, longing to roam free and get back to his horses. In real life, Hayden was always itching to get back sailing. He oozes danger and yet, as Doc perceives, he is honourable and trustworthy. His relationship with Jean Hagen is at the core of the film. She is in love with him but, at the same time, scared to death of him and he does not appear to notice it. It is good to see that her range was somewhat broader than the caricature of a role she gets in “Singing in the Rain”: it is a marvellous performance. Marilyn Monroe gives a charming early glimpse of her acting ability as Calhern’s floozy – a charming naif.

The only moment that really jars is the way that Louis, the safe-cracker, is fatally wounded when a gun misfires in a very brief fight as they make their way out of the heist. It seems too random. However, the film does end on a note of tragic poetry. Miklos Rozsa’s score rises to a romantic climax as Dix finally makes it to Kentucky and his childhood home despite not having enough blood left to keep a chicken alive and then expires in the meadow, with a horse nuzzling his head.

Dancing Lady (October 2011)

Tags

art deco, Busby Berkeley, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, MGM, Nelson Eddy

Selznick – as in the son-in law-also rises – needed a success now that he had joined MGM. Joan Crawford needed a hit after a few flops. The outcome was Dancing Lady – a musical with a plethora of non-musical stars, including Clark Gable and Franchot Tone, the debut of the Three Stooges. some weak songs, an uncredited performance near the end from Nelson Eddy about the “Rhythm of the Day”, and about 5 minutes of Fred Astaire, appearing as himself before he took up his contract with RKO.

It was a fairly obvious copy of 42nd Street, with Clark Gable showing more than a mere trace of the manic quality of Warner Baxter as a legendary Broadway producer, but they lacked a choreographer with the stylistic brio of Busby Berkeley. There are some overhead camera angles but nothing as extraordinarily imaginative nor as kaleidoscopic as in the mind of Berkeley. The greatest flight of fancy is to take Astaire and Crawford on a magic carpet ride from 1930s Broadway to Bavaria, where they do a number dressed in lederhosen, with lots of beer glasses in the background – and this was during Prohibition.

It might have made a better picture if it had not been a musical. Crawford’s dancing was limited and she had very little singing voice. It was actually quite an effective pre-Code drama about the socio-economics of putting on a show. Franchot Tone is a rich man who bankrolls the show as a way of getting into the affections of Joan Crawford by forcing her into the cast with his financial muscle. Then, on a whim, so that the show has to fold and so she cannot make it as a dancer – hence has to marry him – he withdraws his backing. The script is very strong on the social injustice of this, how it puts 100 people out of a job. But at least, neither Tone nor Gable had to sing and dance.

The score only contained one standard, Everything I have is Yours, which only became a hit years later, when Billy Eckstein picked it up. The rest is very poor. In the few days before he joined RKO, Astaire is, simply, himself. Asked by Gable – “now Freddy, take her through it” – he saunters over to Crawford in his characteristic way, asks the pianist for a pick-up and leads her into a tap dance to Dancing Lady.   Unfortunately, she gets cramp and is unable to complete the number.  The next time we see him is at the end, in white tie and tails, dancing on an art deco set with her to The Gang’s All Here, followed by the excursus into lederhosen. What a misuse of his abilities!

The art deco sets are glorious. there is a great montage near the start of the feet of Gable as he tries to get away from the feet of Crawford who is importuning him for a part in his show. The Three Stooges on their first outing were as idiotic and violent as ever – their humour consisted simply of hitting each other as often as possible.