The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is showing at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, California next Friday, January 26, at 7:15 pm – followed by Four Against the World, a Mexican heist movie from the same year, at 9:20 pm. The double bill is part of a week-long festival, Noir City 21, hosted by film historian Eddie Muller.
Noir City is a touring US festival with different movies showing at each stop. In 2018, Jake Hinkson wrote a cover story on Marilyn for the organisation’s four-monthly magazine also known as Noir City (#23, digital only.)
“The Marilyn Monroe that we all remember really began in 1950, in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle … Even in this sprawling menagerie of great character actors, Monroe stands out. Playing Angela Phinlay, the young mistress of corrupt lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), she seems fully possessed for the first time on-screen.
Huston gives her a star’s entrance into the film, with Emmerich watching Angela, bathed in white light, sleeping on a sofa … When she wakes up, she
teases him, ‘What’s the big idea staring at me like that, Uncle Lon?’‘Don’t call me Uncle Lon,’ he says.
‘I thought you liked it,’ she says defensively.
‘Maybe I did,’ he replies. ‘I don’t anymore.’
The interplay between Monroe and Calhern is perfect. There’s an edge to the way she delivers the line ‘I thought you liked it,’ (which leaves little doubt they’re talking about more than a nickname) and there’s shrewdness in the way she looks him over and switches the subject. She knows what the score is.”
Meanwhile, Steve Kronenberg profiles Marilyn’s co-star Jean Hagen in the current issue (#39.) A donation of $20 to the Film Noir Foundation earns you a year’s digital subscription, and the magazine is now also available in print.
“John Huston insisted on casting Hagen as Doll Conovan in The Asphalt Jungle ‘because she has a wistful, down-to-earth quality rare on the screen. A born actress.’ (He also sought Hagen’s advice before choosing Marilyn Monroe to play Angela Phinlay.) Hagen’s scenes with Sterling Hayden’s Dix Handley are suffused with pain and pathos … ‘In The Asphalt Jungle, there are two women,’ Hagen joked. ‘Me and Marilyn Monroe. And I’m not Marilyn Monroe!’ Monroe provides the sexual splash, but Hagen’s performance is endowed with an unalloyed truth. She eases into Doll’s persona with confidence, seizing it and squeezing from it every drop of poignancy and despair.”
The Marilyn Report 