The Concrete Jungle is a strange, taut, jagged British crime movie. Its cool, boppy jazz score composed by Johnny Dankworth surcharges the action, and at the same time keeps saying, with ironic nonchalance, "Tomorrow we die." Robert Krasker's camera work is broodingly desolate outdoors, stiflingly claustrophobic indoors, emphasizing always the jumpy, fragmented quality of modern existence.
What is most potently fascinating in Jungle is also most subtle: U.S.-born Director Joseph Losey's vision of the world of crime as a self-contained universe without external points of reference. Normal society judges and humanizes itself from...