Astonishingly existential nightmare

 THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Hardened criminals and robbers. Money hard to come by, even for allegedly wealthy lawyers. Dames looking for work after their place of business is robbed. A master thief with a master plan who needs financial backing to rob a swanky jewelry store. Some corrupt cops exist who are on a bookie's payroll to keep quiet. This is the hard, spiritless world of John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle," a realistic, hardcore, exceedingly tough picture that is less about a heist than it is a profound character study. This may easily be the most hard-boiled noir picture of the 1950's. 

Huston's crime picture begins with a tall man hiding himself from the cops in daylight hours. Dix is a hooligan (Sterling Hayden) who does small-time robberies and spends every nickel on the horses - considering he was born in Kentucky on a farm, it is no surprise. He can't wait to wipe away "the city dirt" and live on the farm. Eventually, we meet a rogue gallery of colorful characters that includes criminals and cops such as Cobby (Marc Lawrence), the gambling bookie who has a cop on his payroll; Lt. Ditrich (Guy Kelly) is the cop on the payroll who faces a dilemma when a master thief is released from prison, and at the same he is facing pressure from the commissioner; "Doc" Erwin Riedenschneider, the master thief himself (fantastic chameleonic character actor Sam Jaffe) who wants a crooked and broke lawyer, Emmerich (a cool, restrained Louis Calhern) to finance a high-scale robbery; James Whitmore as a hunchback owner of a luncheonette who knows when the heat is on, and we can't leave out "Doll" (Jean Hagen) who is in love with Dix though he doesn't reciprocate.

Lastly, I should not leave out Marilyn Monroe in one of her early roles, before she became a splashy star, in the role of the lawyer's breathy-voiced girlfriend who doesn't quite fit in this world - she is naive yet she also sticks out like a sore thumb in this movie. Compared to Jean Hagen's Doll, who knows how to stand up to Dix, and Emmerich's sickly wife (Dorothy Tree), a mature woman who only wants her husband around to play cards, Monroe feels like a perverse distraction.

"The Asphalt Jungle" has Huston fashioning a corrupt world with only a handful of good people with strong morals. This world is hardly a nihilistic nightmare but it is an astonishingly existential one where criminals are suffocating from the city and as the safecracker (Anthony Caruso) says it, "my wife wants fresh air." There is no sense of joy, reprieve or relaxation in this midwestern city - everybody is always on the run or on the take. An alcohol drink and a smoke is not enough to overcome suffocation, nor is a robbery. Dix is the only one to get close to that rugged farmland of freedom. I suppose he always knew he would die with the horses.  

Adventure and peril on a muted scale

 MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

An alleged grand adventure based on Jules Verne's novel, a sequel to his own justly famous "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Mysterious Island" the movie may justify one reading the book than suffering through a slipshod narrative that feels slightly schizophrenic.

An unmemorable group of imprisoned Union officers during the Civil War break out of a Virginia jail and take off on a balloon that is worthy of Jules Verne. The nighttime escape is shot day for night and so you may be hard-pressed in distinguishing who is who. Michael Craig is the bearded Captain followed by two more Union soldiers (Michael Callan, Doug Jackson); an ecstatic Northern newspaperman named Gideon Spillett (Gary Merrill) who uses flowery language, and a Rebel Sgt. Pencroft (Percy Herbert) with a very Southern twang. The balloon barely makes it through a horrific storm near a Pacific island. It is some unnamed tropical island frequented by pirates that also holds a few prehistoric creatures such as a giant bird, a huge bee with an even larger honeycomb and a giant crab. When the bird and crab are killed, it is feeding time for the castaways. When a shipwreck is seen in the ocean, two English women land on the beach. Yes, you can bet one of the Union soldiers, the young handsome one, falls in love so quickly that marriage plans are already discussed (plus the need for a minister). Although most of this occurs in the book, the movie feels like it is trying to be too many things at once.  

"Mysterious Island" picks up steam with the introduction of Herbert Lom as the spirited Captain Nemo whose Nautilus submarine is no longer in operation. This movie's sense of adventure and peril is so muted though that even when a volcano starts to erupt, it barely holds much excitement (especially with the use of stock footage). The Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects are quite good yet I'll say "Jason and the Argonauts" was far more impressive. Good movie to watch on a Sunday afternoon if you need a sleep aid.