It’s only in B movies that the bad guy gets top billing. That’s the case with The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a showcase for Lawrence Tierney, playing a villain who looks like he’s been lifted out of the 1930s and dropped into this 1947 noir. Cold and deadly, side-of-the-mouth diction. He fits in perfectly with this mix of the ugly and the quaint, the terse and the acidic. The whole thing is a cliché, but a cliché done with a considerable amount of flair.
Tierney plays a hood, a murderer who shoots a man in cold blood and then flees the scene of the crime by picking up a lift with a drunk man driving towards LA. Affable “Fergie” Ferguson (Ted North) has no idea what this dead-eyed dude Steve Morgan is all about – alcohol is clouding his judgement. But as the journey progresses and Steve starts throwing his weight about – offering a lift to two goodtime girls, for instance, when it’s not his car – Fergie’s good manners and decent nature increasingly come into conflict with his sense that it’s him who’s being taken for a ride. Is he going to snap?
The cops are soon on the trail of Steve Morgan, and Fergie, leading to a simple chase dynamic. This is a film with a straightahead direction of travel but with lots of interesting detours. Carol and Agnes, for instance, the two blowsy dames. Carol (Nan Leslie) the more easily persuadable, Agnes (Betty Lawford), the hard-bitten realist ready with a roll of the eyes for whatever crap comes out of Morgan’s mouth next. Or Jack Kenny (Glen Vernon), the eager-beaver gas station pump attendant Morgan offends – by insulting Kenny’s son, twice! Morgan doesn’t realise he’s picked the wrong nobody to bad-mouth.
An old dear Fergie wakes up so he can use her phone to call his wife. A wedding party on a police line up, each getting a one-liner as they exit their scene. A night watchman who gets paralytically drunk while telling terrible jokes. A hayseed inbreed. This is a movie full of interesting little side characters, sketched in a thumbnail and played with concision. The cops, meanwhile, with a murderer on the loose, spend their time investigating by lolling about playing cards and waiting for information to plop into their laps. All except Harry Shannon as Detective Owens, the older cop who’s seen it all and has a dogged devotion to doing his duty.
Tierney spends the entire movie with his lips tight, his eyes narrow and his brow beetled – a tough guy but maybe a fairly dim guy too.
It’s unusual to see so much space given to lazy cops, booze and bad girls, and refreshing too. It’s also unusual to see a top-billed star not attempting to run away with the movie. Tierney knows he’s both main attraction and backdrop – the stable (though bad) element against which all the winking side characters will shine. It’s a selfless turn.
It was about 45 years later that Quentin Tarantino cast Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs. You can see exactly what he saw in him in this movie – nothing out of place, precise and not getting in the way of the bigger picture.
That, in a sense, is the movie too. It knows what it’s doing, where it’s going, and gets on with it. Felix Feist may not be one of the big name directors but he does a good job here. Noir seemed to suit him. Apart from directing the 1933 disaster movie Deluge, he’s chiefly remembered these days for writing and directing two significant noirs – this and 1949’s The Threat. He’s worth investigating further.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
