Legacy
The Asphalt Jungle was one of the most influential crime films of the 1950s.
The film spawned a television series The Asphalt Jungle starring Jack Warden, Arch Johnson, and William Smith (billed as "Bill Smith"), which ran for thirteen episodes in the summer of 1961 on ABC. The series, however, resembled the film in name only. None of the characters in the film appeared in the television scripts, and the plots were devoted to the exploits of the major case squad of the Los Angeles Police Department. One of the most notable features of the series is the theme song written by Duke Ellington.
Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle was the basis of the western film The Badlanders (1958) directed by Delmer Daves, as well as the blaxploitation film Cool Breeze (1972), directed by Barry Pollack.
The Asphalt Jungle instigated the crime thriller subgenre of caper films. The 1955 French film Rififi, which critics such as Leonard Maltin have labeled as the best heist film ever, drew much inspiration from The Asphalt Jungle.
In 2008, The Asphalt Jungle was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)