Thieves' Highway

A 1949 film from Jules Dassin, Thieves' Highway is a thriller about the mundane business of produce trucking. Richard Conte, an actor probably best known for his role years later as Barzini in The Godfather, plays the son of Greek immigrants who returns from along at time at sea to find his father has lost both his legs in a trucking accident. Turns out he was chiseled by a wholesaler who received some tomatoes but never paid for them, and then sent him off in his truck, drunk. Conte swears vengeance, and teams up with Millard Marshall to truck apples up to San Francisco.

There's no way to make this sound very exciting, but the film is something of a white-knuckler. In those days long-distance trucking was a pretty risky business, with drivers having to go round the clock on rickety equipment. They buy from growers, and then sell at a profit to wholesalers, who are looking to cheat them. Just watching Conte drive down a dark highway, his head bobbing due to lack of sleep, is nerve-wracking. Then, when he arrives in Frisco and faces the crooked buyer, played by Lee J. Cobb, Conte makes one mistake after another. He is distracted by a prostitute, Valentina Cortese, who has been paid by Cobb. He eventually gets his money, but is almost immediately beaten and robbed.

Dassin, who was unrepentant about his communism sympathies, which cost him a Hollywood career, seems to delight sticking it to the establishment. He did so in Brute Force (but not in The Naked City). Thieves' Highway seems to be a cynical indictment of the capitalist system, showing it to be riddled with corruption, chewing up honest guys like Conte. It's also interesting that of the two women in his life, Cortese, the working girl who has been hired as an adversary, and his bourgeois blonde fiancee, played by Barbara Lawrence, it is Cortese who ends up being most loyal to him.

Thieves' Highway is one of those muscular, gritty B-pictures that show how much more care a studio like Fox had in those days, when even their secondary pictures were done with care, precision and artistry, as compared to the secondary stuff they churn out these days, which is only to make a buck, nothing more.