A film about truckers that doesn’t quite deliver – bum tish – They Drive by Night is also very much a story heading off up one road only to take a sharp turn onto another.
George Raft (top billed) and Humphrey Bogart (fourth billed) play Joe and Paul Fabrini, brothers who drive as a team of “wildcat” drivers. They don’t work for the man, like many truckers do. Instead they’re entrepreneurial go-getters financing their own rig, buying up loads of farm produce and then shipping it to market where they sell it.
Or that’s the idea. In fact they don’t own their own rig but they are working their way towards it inch by inch, with every minor mishap – a lost wheel in the opening moments of the film – a calamity slowing their progress.
Then Paul (Bogart) suffers a life-altering injury, throwing both him and his brother Joe (Raft) back into the realm of the employee. Where the film shifts more decisively into being about Joe rather than the two brothers. And in particular the choice Joe has to make between wisecracking heart-of-gold hash-slinger Cassie (Ann Sheridan) and boss’s wife Lana (Ida Lupino), whose own husband’s lowly origin as a trucker disgust her, whereas in Joe it’s an aphrodisiac.
What Lana sees in Joe is a mystery, because Joe is largely a blank, thanks in no small part to Raft’s lack of range – as a cold, terse gangster he was fine, but ask him to express emotion and he’s stuck, and you can see it in his performance here.
To compensate Lupino overacts. She’s overdressed throughout as well, though that does suit her brassy, femme fatale character. Sheridan is the best thing in this film, delivering her lines – she gets the snappy one-liners – as zingers.
Bogart underplays, aware of Raft’s deficiencies and trying not to act him off the screen. It isn’t much of a role and Bogart doesn’t get that much screen time yet he acts Raft off the screen anyway.
So, yes, part one – a detailed and fascinating look at the life of the trucker, its dangers and its delights, the roadside stops, the joshing camaraderie of fellow drivers and so on. Then a bridging section where things get properly noirish for a while, as the two women vie for Joe’s attention. Before part two proper begins and They Drive by Night gives up whatever it thought it was doing and goes for a pedal-to-the-metal finish as all-out melodrama – more opportunity for Lupino to set her wig on fire as Lana woos Joe by making increasingly lavish (and eventually illegal) proposals.
There’s a strange shift of ideology halfway through too. From being a story about heroes of the road and their entrepreneurial fight against becoming company men to being a celebration of the same. If part one celebrates the jungle, part two is all about the joys of living in the zoo. But then opposites abound in this film – the chalk and cheese brothers, the duelling women.
In a great plot pivot 21st-century audiences will fully get, everything eventually comes down to tech – a magic eye that opens a garage door – and it’s this that eventually drives Lana insane. “The doors… the doors made me do it… the doors,” she shouts hysterically, as the film hits its climax and Lana incriminates herself disastrously in a courtroom scene that probably belongs in yet another movie.
Raoul Walsh directs and is so slick and quick that you almost don’t notice that it doesn’t really hang together. The driving sequences are exciting (one terrible model shot excepted) and he gives the whole thing hardball, noirish looks, courtesy of the great DP Arthur Edeson (All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, Casablanca), that get the film bracketed very often as film noir, when it’s more your 1930s crime thriller with a melodramatic flourish.
Dark fate does not really have any skin in this game. These men are the masters of their own disasters. So, no, not noir, and putting it in that box distorts both this strange, unsatisfying and yet fitfully compelling movie and the box itself.
They Drive by Night – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
