The Asphalt Jungle and Armored Car Robbery (both 1950)

All crime films should be made in black and white. (Imagine “Heat” with no colors.) Bearing proof of this are two 1950 heist films that have police on the trail of thieves facing more troubles than jail time in “Armored Car Robbery” and “The Asphalt Jungle.” The former is barely longer than an hour and has a story just worth its likely 10-cent short origin, while the latter is dark, massive, and deep, a classic for the ages. Oh, and it has a very young Marilyn Monroe, before she became Marilyn Monroe. And she is damn good.

“Armored” centers on professional thief Dave Purvis (William Talman), a crook who thrives on his gift of having no attachments, be they emotional or concrete. (De Niro’s “Heat” crook could be this guy’s son.) Purvis heads up the daylight robbery of a (go on, guess) armored truck smack in front of L.A.’s Wrigley Field, kills a cop, and spends the rest of the film avoiding police, ditching his crew six feet under, and doing a piss poor job of cutting strings to the dame (Adele Jergens) he’s screwing. The story is so paper thin and the characters one-dimensional, this registers more as a TV one-shot than a big-screen tale. That said, director Richard Fleischer shows beautiful (and gritty) L.A. locales in bright light and dark shadow, from City Hall to dockyards and motels to working class homes just feet from Wrigley. How much of this exists now? Not much I guess.

Directed by John Houston,“Jungle” is crime noir perfected. Sterling Hayden plays Dix, a “hooligan” who gets hired as the enforcer in a (Chicago?) diamond heist headed by an elderly criminal known as “Doc” (Sam Jaffe). Doc reluctantly trusts the loot fencing to a lawyer named Emmerich (Louis Calhern), and the suit pulls a double cross, with murder and suicide dropping fast as police -– honest and corrupt, each with agendas -– close in. Monroe plays married Emmerich’s lover, and dude has a fetish for her shoes. This film truly broke the mold. See, “Jungle” dared speak reality in 1950, showing thieves as just men who for various reasons -– abandonment or disability -– use crime to survive, and police as willing to let deeds slide for cash. Somehow, maybe just because “Jungle” is so good, Houston survived the flag-waving censors pushing the lie of America as a Mecca of virtue. Dix is tough, brave, fatally obsessed, and the most honest character here. This is gold material, from Emmerich forced to play cards with his wife to the final shot of Hayden among several curious horses. They don’t make them like this anymore. Our loss.

Armored: B / Asphalt: A+

The Black Hand (1950)

Unusually bleak for 1950s Hollywood rah-rah American films, “The Black Hand” opens in 1900’s Little Italy, New York, as a local attorney/doting father and husband is killed for daring to cross the Italian mob. The attorney’s teenage son -– a strapping with a thick Italian accent who could pass for young Brando -– vows revenge, and delivers eight years later after he returns to New York in the bodily form of 40-year-old Gene Kelly. A man as Italian as I am not. If you can get past that, this is a damn good film that takes head-on the disappointment of the American Dream for thousands of immigrants as they lived (and do still) under the thumb of petty thug dictators who hold more power and sway than the police or courts. There’s no “Singin’ in the Rain” here. In full dramatic mode singed with anger, Kelly pulls a knife on a guy for information and wields the dagger late in the film for more permanent deeds. Director Richard Thorpe (he later made “Jailhouse Rock”) makes the film feel authentic and lets Italians speak Italian for long periods, no subtitles, and takes the gritty, dark action to Naples. Seriously, Kelly is eccellente. A-