![]() Both rely on long takes, penetrating close-ups, realistic locations, and detailed characterizations to create a texture, convey a mood, and ratchet up the tension. Both star Sterling Hayden, albeit in wildly differing parts. Both The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing feature elaborate heists, carefully planned and ultimately doomed by accident and bad luck. "Meh," he mumbles half-inaudibly, "Wasadifference." Hayden's expression is priceless as his girlfriend tells him to run and the film ends as he delivers the most exquisitely limp and pathetic closing line of all time. It won't be a horse that accompanies Johnny's failure, but a yapping, foppish little dog, whose collision with the luggage cart sends Johnny's suitcase - and with it the whole loot - crashing out onto the runway, whirled around by the propellers in a mad mockery of his planned flight. His luck is no better, however, even if he makes it out alive this time. It's a meticulously planned job, and this time Hayden is not a mere hooligan, but the head honcho. His hope is that the pandemonium ensuing from the guaranteed spill will create a cover for his daring robbery of the racetrack. If Dix loved horses, Johnny treats them rather callously: he even hires a hitman to kill a certain Red Lightning, ahead in the final stretch of the seventh race of the day. But let's rewind for a moment, an appropriate gesture given this film's chronologically fractured storyline. Johnny, Sterling Hayden's character in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 breakthrough The Killing never makes it in the air either, though he comes damn close - all the way to the airplane tarmac in fact. Now it's gone to seed - and so has he, reeling and stumbling through this equestrian limbo until he finally falls hard onto the soil, dead along with his dreams: an Icarus who never even made it off the ground. Earlier in the film, we heard him tell Doll about his happy childhood, a long lifetime ago, when he grew up on this free and open horse farm. As consciousness enters its last dissolve, Dix's car pulls up at a ramshackle Kentucky field. Rather, the ones you raise and ride, the ones you race perhaps, while other people bet on them, earning you money. What about? Horses, and not the ones you bet on. Like a haunted man, he flees his midwestern city for the countryside, loyal girlfriend Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen) at the wheel as Dix slumps in the passenger side mumbling to himself deliriously. His bookie turns to him to provide muscle for a jewel heist inevitable complications ensue and Dix winds up with an infected gunshot wound in his side. In John Huston's 1950 noir masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle, Hayden plays Dix, an honorable but desperate "hooligan" who bets - and always loses - on the races. Maybe Sterling Hayden should just stay away from horses. This is an entry in Adam Zanzie's John Huston blog-a-thon.
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