A Film Canon

If Key Largo responds to a perceived indistinguishability between crime and business with an apocalyptic anticipation of the Second Golden Age of gangsterdom, The Asphalt Jungle settles for a more moderate homage to a form of crime that can remain entirely distinct from legitimate business and political concerns, while retaining their lessons in bureaucracy, diplomacy and, above all, etiquette; that is, the heist, here anatomised for the first time in American cinema, both in terms of roles (safe man, driver, hooligan, fence) and attitudes, including those of Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), who embodies its spirit, Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who embodies its letter, and the 'Professor' (Sam Jaffe), who fuses the two into an epitome of Continental politeness and sophistication, as if to remind the viewer that "after all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavour." In the process, Huston elaborates a number of motifs and scenarios that will become prototypical for the genre, including the extended, virtually silent reduction of the heist to a series of logistical challenges, respectfully contemplated by the Professor as if they were continuous with the artefacts of the gallery in which they occur, the significance assigned to contingencies, accidents and unpredictabilities, and, above all, the arrangement of the narrative around a centrifugal first act, in which the various strands of the heist entangle, and a centripetal third act, in which they disentangle, producing an offbeat panorama that blurs New York and the Midwest into a single nightscape, and imbues the intervening countryside with the stench of the gutter, as evinced in the haunting, poetic conclusion, whose moralistic overtones are directed squarely at the subversion of etiquette, as well as its symbolic corollary - a nostalgic stallion, derived from Dix's ancestor's criminal lineage.