It’s a quintessential heist movie with all of the necessary paranoia and tension among tough (and not-so-tough) guys and yet its deliberate pace is striking. Even the big jewel robbery, which happens in the middle of the film, takes its time. No hyperactive cutting, no pounding music, nothing flashy. It’s just guys doing a job, calmly and precisely, while alarms and police sirens sound off in the distance. John Huston’s camera takes in every detail that we need to know with emphasis on the actors’ faces.
Before that is the hiring of the crew. Huston probably wasn’t thinking about anything like this in 1950, but these scenes almost play like the assembling of a rock band. Little German criminal mastermind Sam Jaffe, who has stealing down to his own kind of science, has a big theft all figured out. He knows exactly how to sneak behind locked doors late at night and how to sneak out. These things are always risky, but Jaffe is no amateur stick-up man. He’s got vision and experience. Also, much like how a band needs a few players to do very specific, very different jobs, so does a heist.
In the parlance of the film, Jaffe needs exactly one “box man” (someone who picks locks and cracks safes), one driver (self-explanatory) and one “hooligan” (someone to knock a few teeth out of anyone who gets in the way—a part brilliantly played by Sterling Hayden, whose strange and uncomfortable quality on screen is perfect here). For that, he hires one proven guy, hires one guy recommended by that guy and hires the third guy out of his own gut instinct. Sounds like a band to me.
The money man, providing the cash for everyone’s upfront costs, is thirty-year film veteran Louis Calhern (in a great performance that could wilt flowers in your living room) as a big-time lawyer whom everyone thinks is made of money, but he’s secretly broke. And desperate. And, despite his law career, has no smarts when it comes to actually being a criminal. He’s like me thinking that I’m a martial arts master because I’ve watched some Bruce Lee movies.
That causes some jumbo-sized problems in the aftermath of the robbery. That’s when everything turns to shit. No spoilers. John Huston’s style is dark and oppressive throughout. It’s a master’s voice speaking, clear and wise. There are lots of shadows and close-ups on hard, unforgiving faces. Each relationship has doom written all over it. Money is depicted as the cause of problems rather than the solution (one character breaks into a flop sweat every time he handles money). Even if these characters get away with the loot, something bad will happen to them eventually. There’s no happy ending coming here no matter what. You can just tell.
Sometimes Hollywood studios imposed uplifting endings on dark movies back then (they almost ruined Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground with that shit), but MGM left this one alone. Thank God—or The Devil. Either one.
You can’t miss a pre-fame Marilyn Monroe in a small part as Louis Calhern’s much-younger mistress. With her eyes full of innocent hope, she doesn’t belong anywhere near the burned-out creeps and losers in this film, but she’s there anyway. A torturous totem of the Good Life that some of these sad fucks are risking everything to achieve.