Word: crime
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Structurally, the plot seems as perfect as the crime. The film's intensity is slow to generate; interest is sustained, though perhaps not as much as it might, by concentration on the emotion of the distraught wife. Some scenes are grotesque, but they are never offensively so. Paul Meurisse, brutal and dynamic, plays the lecher of women and money. Vera Clouzot, palpitating in guilt and disease, is morally both noble and weak as his wife. Simone Signoret, a Shelley Winters of the Champs Elysees, is calm and ecstatically vengeful. The composite is queer, probing, and quite perfect...
Such papers as Sullens' Daily News now run more Negro crime news under bigger headlines than ever before-even when it means going as far afield as Chicago. They spike occasional wire stories that show integration working, e.g., a recent A.P. dispatch about the acceptance of three Negroes at the University of North Carolina. They print and reprint testimonials by Negroes who say that they prefer segregation and ignore Negro leaders on the other side, except to quote them out of context to make them sound like wild radicals...
...Reporter's crime, as the New Republic sees it, was a December "Dear Governor Stevenson" letter written by Editor Max Ascoli. "Quite a number of those who were earnestly, even enthusiastically, for you in '52 cannot easily make up their minds whether or not to join the newly launched pro-Stevenson movement," Ascoli wrote. He advised Stevenson not to try to campaign as a "self-made lowbrow," urged him to open up on Secretary of State Dulles, then warned-with evident admiration-that President Eisenhower has learned a lot and has a great hold on the people...
...torture centers in Cyprus where they beat their prisoners, inject them with truth serums, extract their teeth and fingernails," cried Athens' Voice of the Fatherland radio, beamed to turbulent Cyprus. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, said one newspaper, is "the accomplice of the most shameful international crime of our age." When a policeman was killed trying to keep order on the island, Athens beamed back its own version: "Agents of the foreign dynasty [Britain] provoked the riots and killed the policeman in order to provoke further rioting...
Development of characters, by tracing their psychological and environmental background, seems to be director John Huston's central aim. The Asphalt Jungle, like its descendants, has no intricate plot. The emphasis must fall on the characters' past and how they react to the strain of the monumental crime they commit. Huston succeeds with some of his players and fails with others. The realism he tries to create is ofen shattered by weak dialogue and an implausible story. He has not mastered startling photographic technique. When these attempts at effect fail to divert attention from the stupid, simple plot, the suspense...