Jules Dassin is so associated with Rififi (aka the best heist movie ever) that his other films tend to get eclipsed. Here’s 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, one of his run of great movies, which had got underway with Brute Force two years earlier.
It’s the story of a guy who comes back from the war to find that his immigrant dad Yanko, a truck driver, has lost his legs in an accident and been swindled out of all of his money by an unscrupulous wholesaler. Determined to find answers, Nick buys a truck and takes to the road himself.
Dassin gives us a movie that’s three things simultaneously. At one level a movie about “truck jockeys”, the rigours of the road, the long hauls through the night, the markets where the drivers sell their loads, the bars where they drink, the women they meet.
At another a revenge movie, with Richard Conte particularly well cast as Nick, a decent guy with a steely core – Conte is OK playing nice, but much better when there’s a tough side to be exposed. Against him the equally superb Lee J Cobb as Mike Figlia, a market wholesaler and the villain responsible for Yanko’s situation. Figlia is entirely crooked and runs his operation on charm, and when that stops working, on muscle, and Cobb has the chops and the build for both of those.
And at yet another a political allegory – Nick representing market capitalism, with free agents haggling over prices according to supply and demand. On the other corporate capitalism – Mike the embodiment of a system that’s skewed and kept that way by powerful forces resistant to change.
There are moments of extreme tension, like Nick jacking up his truck to change a tyre, only for the jack to give way while he’s under there, and at times it feels like we’re almost on a dry run for The Wages of Fear (aka the best trucker movie ever), which came along four years later.
Dassin has taken pains to shoot in real locations – the apple orchard where Nick and his driver buddy Ed (Millard Mitchell) pick up a load, the fruit and veg market where they drop off before dawn, the trucker diner full of shouting men, a dockside bar.
The orchard apart, which is all sunshine and health, the rest of the movie is shot in the shadowy, noirish style, lit with glancing shafts of light cutting through by Norbert Brodine.
Valentina Corsa plays Rica, the goodtime girl who’s working for Figlia to undermine Nick’s efforts by cosying up to him, a situation that reverses out when she gets too attached. Corsa is an interesting bit of casting, like a refugee from an Italian neo-realist movie, and also an interesting character, though Corsa’s femme fatale with a conscience never entirely fits in.
Nor, quite, do Slob (Jack Oakie) and Pete (Joseph Pevney), a pair of second-string truckers, a Greek Chorus on wheels, following Nick on the road and hoping to pick up some of his leavings, or indeed his entire load.
And trailing along in the wake of Corsa, Oakie and Pevney is Barbara Lawrence as Polly, Nick’s fiancée, who turns out to be not quite the sweetheart she is initially painted. Largely, I suspect, to make it easier for Nick and Rica to get something going.
Good though they all are, the side characters are makeweights and can largely be ignored. Instead, focus on the duel of wits and fists between Nick and Mike, the intersecting forcefields of acting prowess from Conte and Cobb making this a real joy to watch.
Dassin would follow up the next year with Night and the City (aka the best noir out of the UK) and five years after that, in France, Rififi, which is where I came in.
Thieves’ Highway – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
