|
Crime doesn't pay, a lesson not on the blackboard (Lang's You and Me) but on a short-circuiting timetable. The game of bad luck with animals locked in circles, i.e., the racetrack and the mugs who plan to rob it, "they got their problems, and they got a little larceny in 'em." The scheme has a ringleader (Sterling Hayden) and a gallery of Chester Gould figures, from strapped patrolman (Ted de Corsia) to bartender-husband (Joe Sawyer) to bookkeeper (Jay C. Flippen). Human wrenches get thrown into the meticulous work, most of them from the worrywart cashier (Elisha Cook Jr.) whose magnificently derisive floozy of a wife (Marie Windsor) takes a keen interest in the caper. (Jim Thompson dialogue salts the leader's thoughts on her: "I don't think I'll have to kill her. Just slap that pretty face into hamburger meat.") Stanley Kubrick seizes The Asphalt Jungle, dries it and rewinds it and folds it for the fatalistic grid within, the whiz-kid's fascination with machinery (and cinema is the ultimate machinery) that must go awry. The noir "jumbo jigsaw," out of its classical stage to embrace modernist grotesqueries: Timothy Carey as the sadistic hepcat with rifle and puppy, the chess-playing wrestler (Kola Kwariani) who paraphrases Valéry and is dragged away in a Keystone Kops riot. Kubrick huddles his small-timers around low lamps and makes them walk across vast rooms so the mocking camera can track along, newsreel grayness gives way to a wobbly POV on contorted bodies following a sudden shootout. (Sprawled on her seedy bed the moll anticipates Lolita, towering over her stooge she wheezes out a hard-boiled epitaph, "a bad joke without a punchline.") The horseshoe that punctures the getaway tire, the lapdog that disperses the loot, the caged parrot that cackles at it all. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay Adler, James Edwards, and Joe Turkel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |