Unrated, 1 hr. 52 min. Directed By: John Huston. Release Date:
May 23, 1950. DVD Release Date: Jul 6, 2004.
I’m a relative stranger to noir… and I think this
sort of qualifies. I’m still a bit iffy
on the actual definitions, but The
Asphalt Jungle seems to cover the same sort of topics that I’ve seen gone
through in other films that I’ve been told are noir. Despite not knowing much about noir, which is
a concept I’m beginning to think is a bit like the French concept of “je ne
sais pas,” which means an indefinable something, I’m learning that it’s
something that I generally like. Basically, it means that I think people who pay attention to noir know it when they see it and the rest of us just have to follow along and nod, so I'm nodding.
In the case of The
Asphalt Jungle, I really dug the whole heist milieu. I think that the actual heist component of
the story was very well written. It
flowed well, and there weren’t any of those moments that I associate with heist
movies where things got a bit ridiculous.
The events in this story were outside of my life experience, but I could
see them happening to people who lived in that sort of environment.
What this movie really had going for it, at least
from my perspective, was that it reminded me of old Bugs Bunny cartoons. If one person, even one, had said “you dirty
rat,” I would have died a very happy man.
I suspect it was the accent that queued the memory of those Bugs Bunny
movies that lampooned famous actors of the 40s and 50s, although for the life
of me, I couldn’t place which part of the United States would be home to that
accent. I’m also left wondering if the
accent might be an expectation from the audience… the expectation that is what
“criminals” would have sounded like. It
was an interesting question, but not one I intend to do any research on, but it
tugged at my brain for most of the movie.
If I have a complaint about this movie, it’s a
little one. There were parts of the
movie, mostly in the setup sections of the story, that I thought dragged a
little bit. Otherwise I thought this was
pretty decent, and worth repeated watching.
