Here’s an interesting graphic. A film – John Huston’s 1950 heist movie The Asphalt Jungle – is portrayed as a transparent cuboid. The side facing us is screen-shaped, because that’s what it is – the screen. On the outside is the opening frame of the film, then you pass through the block as you watch, act by act. It’s not only interesting, but also useful, because it enables Mark Kermode, the Observer and BBC critic, to lead us through the block, highlighting frames within as we go (BBC Four). In doing so, he shows how The Asphalt Jungle describes – establishes, even – the basic structure of a heist movie.
In the first scenes, we meet key characters – Sterling Hayden’s hooligan, James Whitmore’s getaway driver, Sam Jaffe’s criminal mastermind – and the act ends with a planning session involving the whole gang. The second act is taken up with every intricate detail of the raid, which is a nail-biting race against time. Finally, the third act follows the demise of the gang as, one by one, they are arrested or killed. There’s the final scene – Hayden staggering into a field, collapsing and dying – and that’s it: we have passed right the way through the block and reached the other side.
It’s a neat, (literally) clear way of demonstrating the building blocks of a heist movie. Kermode’s witty, throwaway commentary (delivered like he doesn’t care, although you know he really, really does) makes it more entertaining than your film studies homework. Then he breaks down the building blocks further. He shows how the planning scene is crucial for understanding what’s going on later in the heist itself, even though the heist itself will almost certainly not go to plan. And he explains the debt that is owed to Nick Park’s claymation classic The Wrong Trousers by … Mission Impossible.
No, really: that scene – Tom Cruise hanging upside down, sensors and lasers all over the place – is almost exactly the same as the one in which Wallace swipes his diamond with the aid of amazing techno trousers, which preceded Mission Impossible by three years. You thought it was the other way around, right? To be fair, Nick Park nicked it from the great French film noir Rififi. A film-maker is lowered ever so gently into the past to steal cinematic gems from his predecessors.
Is that the biggest heist of all, then? If so, does that mean it’s us poor punters who are being ripped off? We think we have seen lots of films, but really we have seen only one. Well, not really: as Kermode says, the building blocks are rearranged, motifs are twisted to meet personal ends, genre expectations are dashed, old tunes are given new riffs.
It strays slightly into film studies territory occasionally, such as when Kermode says, about a scene from Heat, that we can see the legacy of German expressionism filtered through the prism of film noir. But it doesn’t really matter, because the clip – the mirror-image scene, in which Al Pacino’s cop and Robert De Niro’s crook meet in a coffee house and become reflections of each other – is so brilliant that it will make you want to see Heat again immediately. It certainly made me want to see Heat, Dead Presidents and The French Connection, plus The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi for the first time, and to introduce my children to Wallace and Gromit, which somehow – criminally – I have failed to do. That’s the best thing about this series: a passionate, knowledgable bloke talks about films in a way that makes you want to repeatedly enter into transparent cuboids … well, go to the cinema a lot.
To Portsmouth, where, in Love Your Garden (ITV), Alan Titchmarsh is playing with another kind of box. He’s demonstrating topiary. Oh, go on, Alan, clip it into what kids now seem to call a rooster. Then one of your team, the people who seem to be getting fed up with being ordered around, can ask if it’s a self-portrait …
He does a spiral. Never mind. More importantly, a lovely lady called Betty, who has spent her life helping other people and whose eyesight is failing, is packed off for a couple of days. When she returns, what was a sad, hard, grey patch has been transformed into a bright, Italianate paradise. And she does – love her garden.
