Awards and Honors

The Asphalt Jungle earned a number of Academy Award nominations, including Best Screenplay, Best Direction, and Best Supporting Actor (Sam Jaffe). The film lost in all categories to All About Eve (1950). The black and white cinematography got a nod, too, but it lost out to The Third Man (1950). Sam Jaffe received the Cannes Award for the Best Performance of the Year for his j uicy part in The Asphalt Jungle.

The Critics' Corner: The Asphalt Jungle

Cue raved that "rarely do crime melodramas come through as nearly perfect in writing, direction and performances" as does The Asphalt Jungle. The Hollywood Reporter called it "almost a classic of its type."

Although The Asphalt Jungle was criticized for its liberal attitude towards the underworld, The New Yorker commented favorably when it wrote that "in the end one is tempted to regret that crime doesn't pay, because the malefactors are depicted so sympathetically."

The Variety reviewer wrote that the film was "hard-hitting in its expose of the underworld. Ironic realism is striven for and achieved in the writing, production and direction. An audience will quite easily pull for the crooks in their execution of the million-dollar jewelry theft around which the plot is built."

The film holds up exceedingly today as evidenced by this excerpt from BBC reviewer Paul Arendt which is typical of most contemporary assessments: "As usual with Huston, greed and a yearning for the unattainable brings each character to his downfall...The key to all their aspirations is a bag of gems which, much like the eponymous statue in Huston's The Maltese Falcon, prove to be unusable. Shot with an eye for the grimy beauty of the underworld and utterly merciless to its characters, The Asphalt Jungle is a biting, bitter espresso of a movie."

Darryl F. Zanuck praised MGM's crime melodrama by pinpointing the contribution of his future star, Marilyn Monroe. Said Zanuck, "John Huston gave her a hell of a good role. Jesus, she was good in it. I thought it must have been the magic of Huston because I didn't think she had all that in her. But then I put her in All About Eve (1950) and she was an overnight sensation." Given the fact that MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer's saccharine taste in wholesome movie entertainment was largely out of fashion at the time in Hollywood, his hatred of The Asphalt Jungle might be seen as a sort of compliment. Mayer loved stories where people sang and danced to the tune of a happy ending. He was not amused by stories populated with common thugs. He told MGM's executive in charge of production, Dore Schary, "That 'Asphalt Pavement' thing is full of nasty, ugly people doing nasty, ugly things. I wouldn't walk across the room to see a thing like that." Schary dethroned Mayer as MGM chief in 1951.

by Scott McGee