by Mark Osteen
Meanwhile Joe woos Leo’s secretary, Doris Lowery (Beatrice Pearson), asserting that her alleged innocence is a pretense, that she wants him to be wicked so that he’ll bowl her over. When he admits that he would love to give her a “million-dollar ruby,” she replies that he’s like a magician with his “ruby words.”33 Later he resumes his blandishments, claiming that Leo planned to join the combination all along but wanted to be coerced “in order to maintain a moral superiority over me which doesn’t exist. … He pretended to be forced. Is that what you want to do?” Lifting her and placing her on a mantelpiece, he declares that she doesn’t know what she really wants. He may be correct: as we have seen, Leo’s claim that his criminality is cleaner than Joe’s is self-deluded, and Doris clearly enjoys consorting with the powerful, “wicked” Joe Morse. Yet Joe believes that everyone who works in the rackets is just as left-handed as he. In an earlier conversation, after Doris had told him that it’s not wicked to “give and want nothing back,” he answered, “It’s perversion. … To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it—that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately, like my brother did today, … don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself, your brother, to make him feel that he’s guilty, that I’m guilty. Just to live, and be guilty.” First articulating a fundamental American principle—that it is one’s duty to satisfy one’s appetites—as well as a prime tenet of American business—that it is wrong not to take a profit—Joe’s speech ultimately exposes his dawning self-awareness. Beginning as a defense of his “everyone is crooked” ethos, the speech turns into a self-accusation (that by forcing Leo to admit his guilt, Joe was trying to reassure himself of his own innocence) and a confession. Joe is starting to grasp that his excuses mask a hypocrisy more dangerous than Leo’s.
When Leo’s bank is engulfed by the combine, its labor practices abruptly change. As one worker says to another: “See this nickel? It belongs to Tucker, and so do we.” The film thus charts how, as stated in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism transforms workers into wage slaves (Marx and Engels 476). Whereas Leo’s small-time operation made them all feel like contributors, Tucker’s people might as well be working in a factory: they become estranged, as Marx argues, from the process and products of their work, as well as from other workers. Perhaps most important—as shown by the figure of the bookkeeper, Freddie Bauer (Howland Chamberlain)—each worker becomes alienated from his or her own humanity.34 Thus, on entering Leo’s bank and hearing that the profits are now channeled to Tucker, Bauer angrily quits: “I’m not your slave!” But Tucker won’t let him quit, so Bauer uses the method that trapped people often employ: he becomes an informer, keeping the police apprised of Tucker’s activities. After his first call to the cops, Bauer is accosted by Wally, a minion of Bill Ficco (Paul Fix), one of Tucker’s competitors, who proposes that Bauer give him a list of all the banks. “I don’t want to have anything to do with gangsters,” says Bauer. Wally replies, “Whaddaya mean, ‘gangsters’? It’s business.”
Wally’s mock indignation echoes the protests of Joe Morse, who has all along mouthed two conflicting interpretations of his activities: that his hands are clean because he’s just a lawyer, not a gangster, and that this doesn’t matter anyway because all business is exploitative. His conflicted nature is represented by the phones in his office—one above his desk for legitimate business; a second phone, used for shadier activities, hidden in a drawer: right-handed and left-handed endeavors, respectively. This second phone, with which he reports to Tucker and tells the police about Leo’s bank, substitutes for his hands and serves as a switching point between plans and their execution. The phone had allowed him to make a killing from a distance, but now it becomes the nexus where loyalties lapse and secrets become betrayals. Thus when Tucker’s slinky wife informs Joe that his phone is probably tapped, he realizes his “hands” are dirty, his words potentially incriminating. As Joe slowly approaches his desk, the camera, placed just behind the drawer containing his phone, seems to entice him to make a call. Picking it up gingerly, as if it might explode, he hears the telltale click that means someone is listening. These scenes of Bauer’s whistle-blowing, Ficco’s request for lists of names, and Joe’s tapped phone eerily forecast the blacklist period. Indeed, the phone-tapping device is not merely a prediction: during the making of Force of Evil, Polonsky’s phone was tapped by the FBI!35
Now Joe is further conflicted: he wants Doris, who represents the better part of himself, but can’t truly believe in her (or his own) innocence; he wants to save Leo but can’t do so without betraying Tucker and endangering himself. But after Bauer’s snitching gets Doris arrested again, she breaks off with Joe, telling him that Leo will “die of this. … Well, I don’t wish to die of loving you.” Delivering these words in a phone booth, she exposes Joe’s hypocrisy by invoking the instrument that enables it. Returning to his office in the dark, Joe walks toward matching doors that symbolize his choices: stay or quit. Peeking through the skylight of the right-handed door, he views his office on the left, where an FBI agent is using Joe’s own phone to report on him. After the agent leaves, Joe opens his safe, removes his money and a gun, then trudges alone down a deserted Wall St. But it’s too late for Leo: Bauer has set him up to be captured by Ficco. As Leo is taken away, Polonsky dissolves from him to Joe: the older brother will die for the younger one’s sins.
Ficco meets with Tucker and agrees to join Tucker’s combination but wants Joe removed. Interrupting their meeting, Joe learns that Leo has been killed, his body dumped in the Hudson River. Suddenly the phone rings, but nobody answers—at first. Then, as Joe recounts their criminal schemes, he lifts the receiver so that whoever is on the line can hear him implicate Tucker and Ficco in the murders. Ficco fires his gun and the lights go out. A shot of Joe crawling across the room cuts to a shot of the phone; the next shot shows a man, his features immured in shadows, creeping toward the door. Since we have just seen Joe crawling, we assume it is he; Ficco shoots the man and is killed himself. As he dies, a pair of feet kick the gun from his hand and a hand picks up the phone. Only then do we see that the survivor is Joe Morse, who tells the listener he is turning himself in. The shadows imply, of course, that Joe, despite his lawyerly excuses, is indistinguishable from Ficco or Tucker. All are guilty of capital crimes.
In a final gesture of penitence Joe descends a long series of steps (“it was like going down to the bottom of the world”) to retrieve Leo’s body. A shot of him against the wall, then beneath the George Washington Bridge, illustrates his diminishment. In voice-over he speaks: “He was dead—and I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up … because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way—like rubbish—then something was horrible and had to be ended one way or another, and I decided to help.”36 Though anchored in a specific location in New York, the descent is also symbolic: tunneling into his conscience, Joe finds his dead brother—the one he helped to kill—as well as the old Joe Morse. The bridge further suggests that Joe, the “legitimate” lawyer, crossed to the other side by working with a gangster; Leo, the good-hearted crook, crossed back over to appeal to his brother’s loyalty and morality. Each one forced the other to face his own self-deception: thus, as Polonsky asserted, in this film “every act of love is also an act of betrayal” (“Abraham Polonsky” 488). Perhaps most ironic of all: Garfield’s character becomes what Garfield died trying not to be: an informer.
The personal story is political. That is, although Joe’s concluding speech (created to satisfy the Breen Office) suggests that the special prosecutor will clean everything up, the rest of the film implies that neither gangsters nor slimy lawyers are the real problem. Rather, it argues, the fault lies with capitalism itself, which is not only criminal but inevitably leads to other crimes. This is not a critique of American ideals so much as an indictment of their perversion: the
numbers racket baldly dupes those gullible enough to believe that they alone would think of “776” on July 4, but “legitimate” businesses cloak their thefts more cleverly behind phony patriotic slogans about free enterprise.
The City under the City
A small band of men, each with some extraordinary power, team up for an important mission. They plan with meticulous care, each member playing his assigned role. Because their organization aims to challenge a sovereign power, the plan must remain secret. One mistake, however, undermines the mission, and one member betrays the others; the team unravels and one or more members die.
This plot could be that of a superhero tale or medieval quest romance, but it also describes the stories of a noir subgenre that emerged in 1950: the heist picture.37 Films such as The Killers and Criss Cross feature collaborative robberies as part of their stories, but the true heist film places a “caper” or collective theft at its center. One of the first such films, The Asphalt Jungle challenges the emerging law-and-order ethos by enabling viewers to empathize with a gang executing a jewel robbery.38 Although direct leftist critiques were rapidly vanishing from Hollywood (Try and Get Me! and The Prowler, the two last blasts of the Left, were released in 1951), Huston’s film shows that anti–status quo messages were still possible if camouflaged in a pro-law-and-order framework. Released between the initial HUAC hearings and the second round, The Asphalt Jungle not only smuggles in critiques of corporate crime and red-baiting; it also dissects the ethics of secrecy and betrayal that lay at the heart of the blacklist era. J. P. Telotte asserts that the heist film questions the dominant culture’s “efforts to codify, to impose conformity, … to eliminate the enigma of individuality from society” (“Fatal Capers” 165). But Asphalt is less about individuality than about teamwork, loyalty, and honor—paramount values in societies under repression.
The gang’s mastermind, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), just released from prison, recruits Louie Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), Gus Minissi (James Whitmore), and Sterling Hayden’s Dix Handley for the caper. Two others are involved as well: Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a high-strung bookie who provides seed money, and crooked lawyer Emmerich. This team plays a high-stakes game.39 Moreover, like most gangs in heist films, they display the characteristics of a secret society, as brilliantly anatomized by Simmel. Such groups, he writes, create a “second world alongside the manifest world” (330)—or, as the film has it, a “city under the city.” The secret plan endows each member with “inner property”—an enormous boon for these lower- or working-class men, who possess little tangible property. Yet secrets also carry the seeds of betrayal, as each one contains a “tension that is dissolved in the moment of its revelation” (Simmel 333). The secret, that is, simultaneously exists to prevent betrayal and creates the possibility for it: a secret at once unites and divides those who hold it. Hence, as Telotte notes, multiple double crosses “are the ultimate law” of heist movies (“Fatal Capers” 165): the secrets in these pictures seem to exist in order to be betrayed. Simmel speculates that secret societies such as criminal gangs are a by-product of the money economy itself: modern money’s compressibility, abstractness, and “effect-at-a-distance” promote alienation that fosters the growth of secret societies (335). Further, Simmel suggests, “the secret society emerges everywhere as the counterpart of despotism and police restriction” (347). Thus, as HUAC cracked down on Hollywood and the red scare swept through America, subversive groups were pushed underground. The repression of radical organizations created criminals by relabeling once-lawful activities as illicit. Just as secret societies in the noncinematic world bubbled up like the return of the repressed, so heist pictures emerged when direct challenges to capitalism and law and order became taboo. And yet, as Simmel astutely observes, secret societies often become a “counter-image of the official world” and end up imitating the structures and values of the society they had aimed to repudiate (360). As gangs fall apart, solidarity is supplanted by greed, loyalty by betrayal, teamwork by retribution. In The Asphalt Jungle not only does the underworld both mirror the legit world and permeate it; ultimately, the film suggests, there is no difference between the two.
The film’s opening minutes establish the setting in an unnamed midwestern city where crime is said to be out of control yet where police track Dix as he walks the streets and enters Gus’s “American Food” diner (situated next door to the “Pilgrim House”).40 Dix’s rap sheet paints him as a career small-time criminal. But even if he is guilty of some recent holdups, he is less corrupt than Lt. Ditrich (Barry Kelley), who is on the take from bookie joints (including Cobby’s) and under pressure by Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire) to solve the crimes. The police seek Riedenschneider, but he eludes them long enough to introduce his plan to Cobby; during their conversation Dix, who owes Cobby $2,300, interrupts to ask Cobby for more time. Later, when Dix complains to Gus that owing money to the slimy bookie damages his “self-respect,” Gus lends him $1,000; a call to his friend Louie—whose tiny apartment houses him, his wife, and baby—yields another thousand. Soon Dix is visited by Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen), who has lost her job and apartment; he agrees to put her up at his place, no strings attached. Clearly these criminals are actuated by humane values such as loyalty and generosity. Yet they are also trapped: Gus in his seedy diner, Louie in his cramped apartment, Dix by his gambling addiction.41 They are thus ripe for the promise of quick money.
Doc outlines his plan to Emmerich: $1 million in jewelry is waiting to be taken from Belletiere’s; all he needs are the right men and some seed money. Because “men get greedy,” the “helpers”—a “boxman” (safecracker), driver, and “hooligan”—will each receive a flat wage rather than a cut of the take: $25,000; $10,000; and $15,000, respectively. Reynold Humphries aptly notes that this scene resembles nothing so much as a corporate board meeting “from which the workers and their representatives have been excluded”: the proletariat are neither involved in the planning nor partake of the profits (237). The class difference between the owners of the means of production and the workers extends even to the underworld. As mere “functional units” in a “Fordist division of labor” (Mason 99), the boxman (Louie), driver (Gus), and hooligan (Dix) (their descriptions indicate their low status) become alienated workers. Doc and Emmerich, however, share a taste for elegant apparel and young women (Emmerich’s mistress, Angela, is played by a ravishing young Marilyn Monroe). Huston also provides parallels between Emmerich and the other criminals: he has an invalid wife and Louie a sick kid; both Emmerich and Cobby wear bow ties (Humphries 237). Although the underworld and the “legit” world mirror each other, the lower-class criminals are more honorable than the smug, slippery Emmerich.42
The heist gang plans a “left-handed endeavor” in The Asphalt Jungle. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.
This “antiphrasis” (J. Hirsch 85) is most obvious in the case of Dix. According to Doc, hooligans are necessary but repellent figures, and Louie declares that they all have “a screw loose somewhere.” Yet we have already seen that Dix, though ragged and gruff, is kind. What drives him is not greed but a nostalgic dream involving a “tall, black colt” named Corncracker that he rode back on his ancestral Kentucky farm, Hickory Wood. Dix’s obsession with gambling on horse races is the residue of his pastoral fantasy: he hopes to use horses to make a killing and buy back the farm. When he gets there, he tells Doll, the first thing he’ll do is “take a bath in the crick, and get the city dirt off me.” His American dream is not of Franklinesque self-invention but a romantic, Emersonian vision of recovering his aboriginal self through nature and of undoing the asphalt jungle’s contamination. Self-deluded though he is, Dix is honorable (he pays Cobby back) and strong; that’s why Doll, who “never had a proper home,” loves him. Unlike the lovers in the lamming noirs, then, this pitiable pair turn to crime not as a path to upward mobility but as a road to rediscover a lost innocence and sense of belonging.43
Doc carefully outlines his meticulously conce
ived plan to his crew. Similar planning scenes appear in every heist film to emphasize that to succeed, the men must behave like machines, as if they were, indeed, working in a factory. Although the planning scene’s single-source overhead lighting casts shadows on the men’s faces and doubts on their success, once they enter the jewelry store by way of a manhole—“the city under the city”—the robbery comes off almost perfectly, except that a security guard, alerted by alarms going off nearby, comes to the door as the men are escaping. Dix punches him; the man’s gun falls and shoots Louie in the gut. With this mishap the scheme begins to unravel. In fact, as Simmel would predict, the gang’s solidarity had started to disintegrate even earlier. The loose thread is Emmerich, who is broke and plans to double-cross the others, take the jewels, and disappear. But when Doc and Dix meet him and his co-conspirator, a private eye named Brannom (Brad Dexter), afterward, they don’t buy Emmerich’s story. Brannom pulls a gun and wounds Dix before he himself is killed.