WEEKEND IN PALOOKAVILLE:

Mitts in the air, pal ...: The thugs in noir flicks used to pull off capers like nobody's business. Joe Queenan decides he wants a piece of the action (Joe Queenan, October 27, 2006, The Guardian)

The rerelease of John Huston's classic film noir The Asphalt Jungle should be a cause of jubilation for trainee thugs and hoodlums-in-waiting. No motion picture ever did a better job of addressing the problems a master criminal faces when assembling a gang of strangers hell-bent on making a real killing. Released in 1950, it has a cast that includes the rough-and-tumble, yet endearingly boyish, Sterling Hayden (the lunatic in Dr Strangelove and the crooked police captain in The Godfather), and a voluptuous newcomer named Marilyn Monroe. Shot in black and white in a series of exquisitely crummy dives, The Asphalt Jungle still looks like a million bucks, even if some of the dialogue - "Don't bone me!"; "My book beats his"; "They knocked over that clip joint" - sounds a tad mouldy.

The film recounts the adventures of Doc (Sam Jaffe), a criminal mastermind from Deutschland who has just spent seven years in the hoosegow, preparing to pull off the caper of a lifetime. It is an escapade so audacious, he will pocket enough of the long green to retire to Mexico and paw the sultry chiquitas till the cows come home. The target: a bank. The gambit: tunnelling in from next door. The payoff: $1m in precious stones, with half the take going to the fence and the rest getting split four ways. The problem: finding skilled palookas to pull off the job.

Though the upside is enormous, Doc realises that his preposterously cunning plan may never bear fruit. The fence is a double-crossing louse. The driver is a hunchback with attitude. The safecracker gets antsy, goes overboard on the nitro, stops a bullet, books a one-way ticket on the Sayonara Special. The stoolie fronting the cash is a rat fink. The heavy's moll is a floozy; the fence's doxie is a banana head. Only the rustic "hooligan" from Cain-tuck (Sterling Hayden), who supplies the muscle for the operation, is up to snuff. But Hayden - a hard-luck ploughboy with a scamp's smile concealed beneath a forest of 11 o'clock shadow - plays the ponies, has a short fuse, is a loser in love and is too quick on the trigger.

Hayden is the kind of actor who does not exist any more: dangerous but seductive, grizzled but glamorous, tough but tender. In short: not Orlando Bloom. Like his granite-jawed contemporary, Robert Ryan, Hayden evokes a bygone era when men with doxies named Blanche LaRue kept puffing on their stogies even when they'd just taken a .38 slug to the solar plexus. The closest thing we have to Hayden today is Russell Crowe, who is about 28 inches shorter, or Clive Owen, who seems a bit too cerebral to pass as a thug. It is telling that when Americans start casting about for an actor who resembles the charismatic tough guys of the 1940s and 50s, they must look to the Commonwealth. Leonardo won't do. Matt Damon won't do. Mark Wahlberg won't do. Johnny Depp is too sweet, Val Kilmer too weird. Only Sean Penn is in the ballpark. But Sean Penn is not a looker.

See also Stanley Kubrick's not dissimilar, The Killing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 27, 2006 9:06 AM