The Asphalt Jungle
“Trash,” was MGM boss Louis B Mayer’s verdict on The Asphalt Jungle when he saw it in 1950. “Ugly people doing nasty things,” he added, possibly unhappy that John Huston had borrowed from the glamour-dodging European neorealists to make what’s now considered to be one of the pre-eminent films of the 1950s. Does Mayer have a point? Not from this end of the telescope. If nothing else, Huston has been proven right by the passage of time and the respect of countless other directors. You can see plenty of The Asphalt Jungle in the work of Quentin Tarantino, for instance. It’s a heist movie, a heist-gone-wrong movie in fact, and so there’s nothing … Read more