332 - Thieves' Highway, United States, 1949. Dir. Jules Dassin.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

332 - Thieves' Highway, United States, 1949.  Dir. Jules Dassin.

Nick Garcos comes home from the East.  He has fought in the War and has travelled overseas.  Now he returns to his father, mother, and girlfriend.  He brings gifts.  He gives his girlfriend, Polly Faber, an engagement ring.  And he discovers, awkwardly, that his father has lost his feet in a truck driving accident instigated by crooked fruit peddler Mike Figlia.

To make matters worse, Yanko, his father, sold his truck to Ed Kinney, and Kinney is a few payments behind.  He might be taking advantage of Nick's father.

Nick is angry.  He vows to make things right for Pop.  To get his truck back.  To get justice..

Nick goes to Ed Kinney and demands the truck.  He acts as his own repo man.  Kinney appeals to him.  He has to have the truck to make a run in order to make money to make the payment.  And he has just found a grove of Red Delicious apples on a sun-facing slope of a hill.  He can be the first to get to them.  He can get top dollar up in San Francisco.  Then he can catch up on the payments.

Kinney offers for Nick to go in with him.  Nick relents.  And threatens Ed not to try any funny business.

Nick makes a down payment on a second truck, and the two men are now in business.  The new father figure is driving the real father's truck.  Nick is driving the new truck.  And they are both loaded with apples.  Now if they can just make it to San Francisco before their competition drives the prices down.  And if they can just make it there at all. . . .

Pete and Slob are two members of their competition.  They have followed them.  Found the grove.  Loaded their newer and stronger truck.  And are following them.  Right on their tail bumper.

The film follows the adventure and drama of the truckers and the produce workers as Nick and Ed and Pete and Slob, make their way to the market, and as Nick deals with the crooked Mike Figlia.  And his men.  And a woman.  A working woman.  Rica.  Who puts him up in her room.  And who either loves him or is being paid by Figlia to make him think so.  Meanwhile, his fiancee Polly is coming up to be with him.

Uh-oh.

Thieves' Highway is the second trucking film based on a novel by A. I. Bezzerides, a writer who had been a truck driver himself.

The first film, and first novel, was They Drive By Night (1940), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Humphrey Bogart--a film which begins as a straight trucking drama and then turns into a proto film noir, just one year before Bogart became a star and film noir started its ascendancy with John Huston's debut film The Maltese Falcon (1941).

The second film, Thieves' Highway came out nine years later.

Director Jules Dassin seems to enjoy location shooting and the lives of working people.  He stated in an interview that he loved markets, deriving joy from a French market he frequented when he lived in Paris.  He loved the cleverness and wit of the workers and the steady hum of their workings.

Conte delivers a strong performance here, as does a young Lee J. Cobb as Mike Figlia and Millard Mitchell as Ed Kinney.  The Italian Valentina Cortese plays Rica in one of her early American roles.  You may know Cortese from The Barefoot Contessa (1954), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner.

Driving a truck is risky business.  The men invest a lot of money up front--for the truck and for the produce.  Driving itself is dangerous--with long hours, the chance of falling asleep, having a flat tire, getting pinned under the truck, losing the drive shaft, and crashing.  And the buyers at the other end are organized and working to cheat them and even hurt them.  In the end the are either going to make good money or barely make anything.  Or lose money.  Or lose their lives.

The rule seems to be a life of hardship and struggle.

Nick is determined to be the exception to the rule.