You really have to sit down and think things through before you can screw up a film noir classic like John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" (1949). If you did nothing more than a bad imitation, it would still come out looking pretty good because the original is so superior. So it's hard to botch up an expertly made original film.
Yet the screenplay by Richard Collins and the pedestrian direction by Delmer Daves manage to pull off this feat. They've ruined it. They've turned it into a Western, to start with. That's the fate of many other successful dramas, like "Kiss of Death." The acting by poor Alan Ladd was getting soggy by this time in his career. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado aren't bad. Kent Smith is the same agreeable and unexciting actor he was in "The Cat People" fifteen years earlier.
But, despite the fisticuffs and whippings and explosions and added romances and the happy ending, it's as if some vampire had crept in from a nearby sound stage and drained everyone of both blood and taste.
For anyone who's seen the original, the burglary by a gang of specialists is unforgettably tense and the tension mounts, moment by moment. The crime is shown clearly and in almost complete silence. Here, instead of a complicated technical task performed by carefully selected specialists, the hastily gathered gang simply has to blow a vein of gold out of an abandoned mine. (Boom, and a cloud of dust, masking who's who.) And during this supposedly tense scene, the music pounds, and it sounds like it's from a horror film, not a Western drama, as if that vampire had dragged it along behind him.
It's not a lousy movie. It's just not very good. It doesn't seem like an incident out of the Old West. It looks like a perfunctory Western movie.
It begins with punishment being dished out in Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona. The ruins are still there, open to tourists. The plaques inform us that it's been misrepresented in the media, and the visitor gets the impression that it was really a rather nice place, sort of Club Med, serving lobster newburg rather than barbed wire sandwiches, and the corrections officers gave the inmates body rubs after their work out on the tennis courts.
Yet the screenplay by Richard Collins and the pedestrian direction by Delmer Daves manage to pull off this feat. They've ruined it. They've turned it into a Western, to start with. That's the fate of many other successful dramas, like "Kiss of Death." The acting by poor Alan Ladd was getting soggy by this time in his career. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado aren't bad. Kent Smith is the same agreeable and unexciting actor he was in "The Cat People" fifteen years earlier.
But, despite the fisticuffs and whippings and explosions and added romances and the happy ending, it's as if some vampire had crept in from a nearby sound stage and drained everyone of both blood and taste.
For anyone who's seen the original, the burglary by a gang of specialists is unforgettably tense and the tension mounts, moment by moment. The crime is shown clearly and in almost complete silence. Here, instead of a complicated technical task performed by carefully selected specialists, the hastily gathered gang simply has to blow a vein of gold out of an abandoned mine. (Boom, and a cloud of dust, masking who's who.) And during this supposedly tense scene, the music pounds, and it sounds like it's from a horror film, not a Western drama, as if that vampire had dragged it along behind him.
It's not a lousy movie. It's just not very good. It doesn't seem like an incident out of the Old West. It looks like a perfunctory Western movie.
It begins with punishment being dished out in Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona. The ruins are still there, open to tourists. The plaques inform us that it's been misrepresented in the media, and the visitor gets the impression that it was really a rather nice place, sort of Club Med, serving lobster newburg rather than barbed wire sandwiches, and the corrections officers gave the inmates body rubs after their work out on the tennis courts.