A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Here’s what Netflix says about The Asphalt Jungle.

Nominated for four Academy Awards and long considered a noir classic, John Huston’s heist film follows a band of criminal masterminds (Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden and Louis Calhern) as they carry out a million-dollar jewelry-store burglary that will have them set for life. Snatching the loot is easy, but their greed soon leads to double crosses and murder. The film features an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe as a sexy moll.

Sounds pretty awesome, huh? Gritty and intense and with some sex appeal, too, courtesy of Marilyn Monroe, right? Sadly, not so much. There’s really not a whole lot of double-crossing or back-stabbing, or chasing or law-breaking either, and in the end the movie winds up feeling more like a sluggish morality play in which everything that happens happens because the filmmakers or the studio thought they ought to be sending the correct social message rather than because of the dictates of the story and the characters.

I wonder if they realized that at the time, though. It’s all too easy to incorporate unexamined assumptions into your writing, because those assumptions just plain feel right and even inevitable. It’s something everyone should be careful of.