The Asphalt Jungle marked a departure for director John Huston. As e xemplified by his spectacular directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Huston rarely took his camera beyond the confines of an interior setting, whether it be a shady tenement or a moody police station. With the The Asphalt Jungle, Huston now had the story to allow him and his camera to move out from under a roof. However, Huston still kept the film behind the walls at MGM Studios in Culver City, California. Most of the urban thriller was filmed there, with the last scene shot in Lexington, Kentucky.

The menacing urban environment inspired other filmmakers to actually set and shoot their tough little melodramas outside the controlled environment of the studio set. T he creators behind films like Killer's Kiss (1955), and The Phenix City Story (1955) opted for the city or on-location shooting because it was cheaper than studio shooting and the reality of on-location lent an immediacy to the story being told. Ironically, without having been shot in a real city, The Asphalt Jungle showed how city street realism could make a film noir narrative come alive with a pervasive sense of menace. The Asphalt Jungle has influenced a number of films about elaborately planned heists, like The Killing (1957), also starring Sterling Hayden in a very similar role. Others include Ocean's 11 (1960), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1997), and more recently, The Score (2001) and Heist (2001).

Another debtor, The Usual Suspects (1995), even alludes to the line of dialogue about crime being a left-handed form of human endeavor. So far, there have been three remakes of The Asphalt Jungle: The Badlanders (1958), Cairo (1963), and Cool Breeze (1972).

The Asphalt Jungle was not the first W.R. Burnett novel John Huston adapted for the screen. In 1941, Huston wrote the screenplay for High Sierra, an adaptation of a Burnett novel and starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart.

by Scott McGee