Noir November - The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Asphalt Jungle is one of the best movies in the crime genre ever made. The film boasts a solid cast of B-level actors (Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe), great direction by John Huston, cinematography that captures the grit of the city and a tightly plotted story. It is required viewing for anyone who loves crime dramas, film noir or movies in general.

"Doc" Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), a master criminal known throughout the underworld, has just been released form prison. He travels to a nameless city somewhere in the Mid-West with a "caper" in mind. He gets in touch with Cobby a local fixer and bookie (played with ferret-like intensity by Marc Lawrence) and secures funding from a local lawyer, the shady Alonzo Emmerich (played with an oily, superficial charm by Louis Calhern). The plan is to rob a local jewel merchant of over half-a-million dollars in stones. "Doc" organizes a crew made up of Dix Handly (Sterling Hayden) as the "hooligan" (muscle), Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) as the "box man" (safe cracker) and Gus (James Whitmore), the driver. Even though the robbery is successful, the aftermath is more problematic. With the police on their trail and with treachery afoot, "Doc" and Dix have to figure out a way to escape The Asphalt Jungle.

Filmed in Cincinnati and Los Angeles (mostly in the latter, at MGM Studios), Huston gives the film an almost post-apocalyptic look. The city seems to be almost deserted. The opening sequences (where the Cincinnati shooting is featured) depict a rundown, urban wasteland. The only exteriors showing life outside of the "rough areas" of town are at the jewelry store at night, maintaining the stark and empty visual motif. Interiors are cramped and rundown from Gus's tiny greasy spoon diner to Cobby's minimalist gambling den to the claustrophobic apartments that the criminals live in. Even Emmerich's home and cottage/love nest for his mistress, Angela (Marilyn Monroe in a small but colorful part) are mostly small sets - an office, a bedroom, a foyer, probably the largest room, one that serves no function. One can understand the desperate nature of the characters, given the dark, constricted world they live in.

Sterling Hayden looking appropriately badass.

The cast is almost perfect. The characters are all film noir archetypes, from Hayden's thug with the dreams of a child (his only goal, his obsession, is to raise enough money to buy back the horse farm he lived on as a boy), to Jaffe's criminal mastermind with a fatal flaw. In this case, his flaw is his sensuality; he wants to live the good life, giving in to impulses that lead to his eventual - and inevitable - downfall. Emmerich is broke, living a life-style that has drained him of money and made him desperate. He has a bedridden wife and a young mistress, a good representation of his dual nature, the life he used to have (with a loving wife and, one gets the impression, a more respectable legal practice) and his life now (mistress "young enough to be his grand-daughter," defending criminals and getting directly involved in crime). These are rich, complex characters.

The film is also noteworthy for the amount of care and attention paid to the details of the heist. The audience is shown how much planning goes into a professional crime. From securing state-up funds, finding a "crew" and, once the robbery is underway, the details of defeating security systems, cracking a safe and dealing with the stolen goods afterwards. During the heist - an 11 minute scene - everyone behaves calmly and professionally, Huston's direction and the cast's acting selling the illusion that these men are professional thieves. While scenes like this are common now, for 1950 this was pretty revolutionary.

While the point of view of the police is presented, they are not shown in the best light. The lead detective is a crook, taking money from Cubby in exchange for not shutting down his gambling den. The police commissioner (John McIntire) while an upstanding man, is also shown to indulge in crude stereotypes about the men he is chasing. In particular, he says that Handly is a "man without human feeling, without human mercy" something he most definitely is not. Even the arrest of Reidenschneider presents a scene of moral ambiguity. Set in a roadside diner, Doc is paying a young woman to dance for him. While it is mostly innocent - she and her friends were dancing to music on juke box anyway - he clearly is getting pleasure watching her. As he leaves, two state troopers pick him up. He asks them how long they were waiting and they say long enough to watch the girl dancing as well. It is clear that audience is supposed to question how different the police and the criminals really are. In the end, there is a preachy scene where the commissioner addresses some reporters. Without the police, he says, there would be chaos. While this might be true, the movie portrays all levels of society as corrupt and driven by base desires. The most loyal relationships are between the criminals Gus and Dix, and Dix and Doll (Jean Hagen) his boozey, ditzy, but devoted friend (they have some sort of relationship, but are not a committed couple).

The Asphalt Jungle is a complex, multi-layered story, one that rewards repeat viewings with its rich characterizations and engaging acting. Huston creates a set of images that tells a story from the edge of civilization, in a morally bankrupt, physically decaying urban wasteland. Anyone who loves films or just great stories should see this.

Marilyn Monroe...is she good? Is she bad? Or is she just really, really hot...yep, that's it.

31 Days of Halloween (Day 17) - The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

I decided to check out a sequel to a movie that is already part of my 31 Days series, The Hills Have Eyes 2. With Hills 2 we get to revisit everyone’s favorite radioactive mutant cannibal clan and see what they’ve been up to since the first film’s bloodbath.

After the success of Alexandre Aja’s Hills (making around $70 million on a budget of $15 million) it was no surprise that a sequel was made. Released in 2007, Hills 2 is superficially different, but eventually becomes more of the same; freaky mutants, gruesome kills, mutant rape (why someone decided this should be a trademark of the films is beyond me), and people in way over their heads having to become savages to survive.

Set two years after the first film, Hills 2 opens with a mixed team of scientists and soldiers setting up remote sensors after the Army has conducted “search and destroy” operations in the area to clean up the mutant menace. They missed a few and the mutants attack, wiping out most of the team. We are then introduced to our protagonists, a group of National Guardsmen conducting training exercises who are detoured to drop off some gear to the scientists. The characters are all stereotypes: the peacenik, the Rambo-wannabe, the big dumb guy...we’ve seen them in a thousand movies and will see them in a thousand more.

In short order, they find their long-range radios don’t work, they split up with most of the squad going to rescue a lone survivor and their only vehicle is destroyed. The survivor, Colonel Redding (Jeff Kober) lasts long enough to tell the Guardsmen what they are up against and how doomed they are, before taking his own life. Well, that’s one option. The mutants begin to attack and pick off squad members rapidly. The squad leader is taken out by friendly fire - we knew he had to die, because he was the only guy who knew what to do - but this isn’t a bad variation on how he’s killed. There’s the usual characters doing dumb things. For example, right after one of the mutants is killed, a female soldier - Missy (Daniella Alonso, whose defining characteristic is that she has a son) - wanders off to relieve herself and is promptly snatched. This, of course, makes no sense. It’s always a problem when a movie relies on characters doing obviously dumb things to move the story forward.

The survivors head into a series of mines that honeycomb the area to rescue Missy and to try to find a way down the mountain they are stuck on. More soldiers and mutants are killed off and Missy is subjected a brutal rape by the head of the mutant clan. She is rescued, the mutant patriarch is killed and our heroes emerge from the mines. There is a cut back to the science camp where a mutant is using the sensors to monitor the movements of the survivors, presumably leading to their demise. The End.

Hills 2 is not bad, once you get past the stereotypical characters and some serious leaps in logic that are used in place of more sophisticated storytelling. The mutants have even less personality than those in the first movie. Also there are just some really dumb scenes. A good example is the death of Colonel Redding. When the squad finds him, he is torn to shreds, wedged between some rocks and barely alive. He then somehow manages to get up, walk past them, go to the edge of a cliff, give a little speech and then shoot himself. Given how the scene is blocked, this makes no sense spatially. However, the pace is so fast that it would be easy for the viewer to just gloss over the holes in the plot.

On the plus side, the mutant makeup is well done. The gore effects are graphic and creative. There pacing is quick and doesn’t slow down for the entire movie. The direction is competent. In general, you know what’s happening in the fight scenes and the director gets the most out of the mountainous terrain. The film suffers a bit from the third act being entirely in the mines. While it does create a dark and sinister wonderland for the mutants to stalk their prey, it gives the film a cheap, set-bound feel.

The biggest problem I have with this movie is the missed opportunity. A more interesting alternative would have been to show use the Army’s “search and destroy” mission, perhaps even crafting a story in which some of our sympathy would lie with the mutants. Given that they are trying to survive as best they can in a hostile environment and that we are told they were hunted down by the government, this approach could have taken the clash between mutant and normal family and turned of the first film and turned it on its head. Instead, we get a very “by-the-numbers” splatter flick. An entertaining one, for those who like this horror sub-genre; but nothing memorable.

If you’ve seen Aja’s film and liked it, I’d say check this one out. It’s definitely inferior to the original, but it does have enough twisted mutant fun and blood and brain splattering kills to keep you occupied for 97 minutes.

Movie Review - Xtro 1983

I have a new review up on Yahoo voices; Xtro, a science-fiction/horror movie from 1983. Check it out.