The New Pictures

The Asphalt Jungle (MGM) is an ambitious attempt by Director John (Treasure of Sierra Madre) Huston to explore a gang of criminals as human beings, while telling the tense story of an intricately planned $1,000,000 jewel burglary. The two-hour result falls somewhat short of the attempt. But thanks to brilliant direction and skillful work by Co-Scripters Huston and Ben Maddow in adapting a W. R. Burnett novel, it comes close enough to make the film well worth seeing.

"Crime," observes one of the characters, "is only a left-handed form of human endeavor." To dramatize the point, the picture sets itself the task of probing half a dozen major characters and offering keen glimpses of as many minor ones. Among those in the rogues' gallery: a ruthless hooligan (Sterling Hayden) with a twisted sense of honor and self-respect; an urbane lawyer (Louis Calhern) who is addicted to high living and low morality; a coldly efficient criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe); a spineless, greedy bookie (Marc Lawrence); a cop-hating hunchback (James Whitmore); a home-loving safecracker (Anthony Caruso); a pathetic nightclub trollop (Jean Hagen); a cynically corrupt detective (Barry Kelley).

Against the sordid backgrounds of an anonymous big U.S. city, the film deftly introduces its main characters one by one, starts to develop them with quick strokes while linking them together into the burglary plot. It gives a fascinating account of Jaffe's precise planning to burrow underground into a jewelry store at night, and his businesslike recruitment of personnel for the job. With very little dialogue, it pictures the jewel theft in a long, intimately detailed sequence of torturing suspense. Then a doublecross explodes the mastermind's plan.

After that, though Huston's fine hand is almost constantly evident, the movie never builds up again to the same tension. With its criminals plainly doomed, it takes too long to resolve their fate in terms of their individual motivations and foibles.

Some moviegoers, sharing Huston's preoccupation with his characters, may applaud his decision to see them through at any cost. But the characters themselves, while uniformly well acted, are unevenly drawn. Some, e.g., the master criminal and the self-pitying bookie, are excellent. But the safecracker who worries about his sick child is pat and overworked, and the important character of the crooked lawyer is trite. And with the death of the hooligan in a Kentucky meadow, his head nuzzled by the horses he longed to see again, Huston gives a hard-bitten film a surprisingly mawkish ending.

Even with its shortcomings, the picture succeeds to a remarkable extent in understanding its criminals, and creating a kind of perverse sympathy for them without condoning their crimes. To have accomplished that within a story which is also a taut and exciting thriller, lifts The Asphalt Jungle high above the run of melodramas that do not score half so well on targets much easier to hit.

Winchester '73 (Universal-International) is a crisp western in which a handsome repeating rifle ("the gun that won the West") inspires such yearning, fondling and fighting as not even horses, let alone heroines, ordinarily provoke.

The rifle, a perfect one-in-a-thousand specimen of the 1873 Winchester (.44-40), is won by James Stewart in a shooting match. Then it is stolen by his brother (Stephen McNally), who is being hunted down by Stewart for the murder of their father. Before the hunt ends, the rifle is lost & found by half a dozen other characters, giving Director Anthony Mann plenty of story line to tie together some classic horse-opera situations. Among the episodes: the scalping of a crooked trader by redskins; a deafening battle between Indians and the U.S. cavalry; the ambush of desperadoes in a burning house; a bank holdup and, finally, an exciting rifle duel on the side of a craggy cliff.

Strikingly photographed in black & white, the film is directed with an eye to realistic detail, an ear for the script's frequently natural dialogue and a knack for building suspense. It also has some good performances by Dan Duryea, John McIntire and Millard Mitchell, as well as Actors Stewart and McNally. Heroine Shelley Winters, who seems lost in all the uproar, might as well have been lost in the script.

The Big Hangover (MGM) has a theme reminiscent of the 18th Century legend about George, Duke of Clarence, who was reputedly drowned in a vat of malmsey wine. As modernized by Writer-Director-Producer Norman (Dear Ruth) Krasna, The Big Hangover tells how Van Johnson narrowly escaped a similar fate: when a French monastery was bombed during the war, he had to stand on tiptoe for hours in a cellar flooded with 100-year-old brandy. The ordeal left him so vulnerable to alcohol that even a glass of punch could set him talking happily to a lampshade.

To keep the comedy rolling, Johnson is represented as a sober-minded young attorney employed by a law firm composed equally of legal tricksters and practical jokers. He is also pursued by his boss's daughter (Elizabeth Taylor), an amateur student of psychiatry. Krasna has fleshed out the farce idea with a curious subplot about the law firm's efforts to keep a Chinese-American tenant out of a "restricted" apartment building. The result makes an odd layer cake composed" of alternate slabs of slapstick and preachment, none of it very digestible.

The Capture (RKO Radio) is a western with psychiatric overtones, a bright enough idea that didn't quite work out. Lew Ayres, an American oilman in Mexico, goes out after a payroll bandit and shoots the wrong man. Remorse, complicated by some amazing coincidences, leads him to break his engagement, quit his job, marry the murdered man's widow (Teresa Wright) and set out to clear the dead man's name. He is soon involved in a second murder, causes a suicide, and gets mixed up in a somewhat pointless chase sequence, in which he finally manages to salve his conscience just as the Mexican police are closing in.

Written and produced by Novelist Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch, The Capture is told in a series of flashbacks that explain too much about Lew Ayres and not enough about the rest of the cast. Despite some good photography, a stark Mexican background, and a fine feeling for place and incident, the indecisive plot suffers from the same fuzziness that clutters up the dialogue.

Caged (Warner) uses the sob-and-slap technique to tell the story of a pregnant 19-year-old girl (Eleanor Parker) who is sentenced to state prison because of her part (innocent, of course) in a gas station holdup. Entering her cell block with the diffidence of a rabbit stepping into a jungle, she has trouble adjusting to the hysterics, hair-pulling and suicide that are rampant among her fellow inmates. Like other movie prisons, this one is run by a "good" warden (Agnes Moorehead), who is hamstrung by politicians, and a "bad" matron, who eats caramels and reads love stories while her charges suffer. Unable to keep her newborn baby, rebuffed by her mother (brilliantly played as a well-intentioned featherbrain by Phoebe Brand), refused a parole, and finally deprived of a foundling kitten she has adopted, Eleanor changes from a bewildered innocent into an embittered malcontent.

Scripted by Virginia Kellogg and Bernard Schoenfeld, Caged has a tendency to spell out all emotions--especially sentiment--in large, block capital letters. But John Cromwell's direction has some unblinkingly realistic moments, and Caged ends on a stringent and unexpected note: paroled at last, Eleanor joins up with a vice ring and the hard-bitten warden gloomily reserves a cell for her early return.

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