Critics reviews

The reverberations in this MGM B-feature are multiple, although that doesn't prevent it from still seeming fresh today... Promoting the film when it came out, Huston described each member of the gang as having a separate vice, and this is what also makes each of them life-sized. No less impressive are Miklós Rózsa's characteristically brazen score and Harold Rosson's glittering cinematography.

[One] of Huston's best work of [the 1950s...] It's a noir observing the build-up and aftermath of a jewel heist, taking considerable interst in both the process of the vault-cracking and the workaday lives and dreams of its gang of double-crossing crooks, including a superb, oleaginous Louis Calhern as their old-moneyed backer, the whole affair owing not a little to Huston's own 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

It firmed up the template for one of cinema's most familiar dramatic arcs: the assembling of the team, the high-precision execution of the caper, the chaotic and generally bloody aftermath. Yet even if The Asphalt Jungle was seen in its own day as a model of nail-biting suspense, it comes across now as a most Chekhovian film noir, steeped in a mood of regret even before the action begins and proceeding almost gently on its inevitable downward course.

Huston often frames these men in obtuse ways, whether from an unusually low angle or with their faces obscured in darkness for long periods of time, which makes The Asphalt Jungle, in terms of visual style, a somewhat conventional noir for its time period. Yet there's nothing remotely commonplace about Huston's handling of space between and within scenes, with objects consistently marking three or even four planes of action.

The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor... With a special focus on Hayden, whose brutish snarl masks his essential decency, the film aligns its sympathies with the working-class criminal stiffs who take all the risks but reap none of the rewards. In postwar America, many viewers surely found Huston's underworld looking more than a little bit like its legitimate counterpart.

Among John Huston's most overrated works, only partially redeemed by Jaffe's brilliance and Marilyn's cameo.

John Huston's bleak, semidocumentary account of a jewel heist and its moral consequences. One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution. But Huston's interest remains with his characters, who dissolve as tragically as the prospectors of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the adventurers of The Man Who Would Be King.