Noir Diary # 3: He Ran All The Way (John Berry, 1951)

Within the grand index of blunt-poetic film noir / pulp fiction titles, I think “HE RAN ALL THE WAY” ranks as a pretty good one. Perhaps not quite up there with the abstract magnificence of ‘Blast of Silence’ or ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, but it definitely fits in nicely alongside ‘Everybody Had a Gun’ or ‘They Drive by Night’ in the “slightly more literal” category.

It’s a shame then that the film itself finds indolent small-time hood Nick Robey (John Garfield) running only as far as his nearest swimming pool, after he finds himself holding the bag when a botched payroll robbery leaves both his more experienced partner (Norman Lloyd) and a cop bleeding out somewhere behind his departing heels.

Desperately trying to concoct a short term survival strategy whilst literally treading water in the crowded public pool, Robey strong-arms himself into an uncomfortable “meet cute” situation with Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters), an insecure young woman so startled by Robey’s amorous attentions that she is persuaded to let him accompany her back to her family’s brownstone apartment -- where he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie, holding Peggy’s mother, father and pre-teen brother at gun-point in what modern viewers will swiftly identify as an early example of the now familiar Home Invasion sub-genre.

I suppose it must have been decided at some point that “HE BASICALLY STAYED IN ONE PLACE” or “HE REFUSED TO LEAVE” just didn’t quite cut it as titles, but no matter; where sprinting enthusiasts may find themselves disappointed by ‘He Ran All The Way’, fans of the more socially conscious / gritty realist strand of early ‘50s film noir are in for an absolute treat. In every sense other than the lack of running, this one is about as good as it gets.

As you may be aware, John Garfield stands as about the closest thing ‘40s/’50s Hollywood ever got to a martyred saint. After a career largely spent bucking the demands of the studio system and instead championing radical theatre and progressive social causes, Garfield found himself blacklisted with immediate effect after he refused to “name names” when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. It has since been widely assumed that the stress caused both by this and by the simultaneous collapse of his marriage were the main factors which led to his sudden death from a pre-existing heart condition in May 1952, aged just 39.

Shot at around the same time that Garfield was called to testify before HUAC, ‘He Ran All The Way’ represents the star’s final film appearance, and, in retrospect, it provided him with one hell of a way to go out.

As an early champion of the “method”, Garfield perhaps drew upon his own feelings of persecution and impending criminalisation to help transform Nick Robey into an unsettling, sweat-drenched case study in twitchy, working class delinquent paranoia. Simultaneously pitiable and self-pitying, feckless and sadistic, Robey is unpredictable and delusional enough to become genuinely frightening – the kind of guy capable of flipping out and doing just about anything in a moment of rage, only to breakdown and cry with remorse when it’s all too late. At the same time though, he is also weirdly sympathetic – the archetypical dumb, overgrown kid who was probably raised with a daily beating, and never got an even break.

Garfield delivers a powerhouse performance here that can’t help but dominate the film, and if Robey sometimes feels like a character we’ve met a hundred times before, that’s probably because we’ve seen variations of this kind of performance style refracted through the prism of subsequent generations of actors for whom Garfield’s example kicked open the doors, be it Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, Hopper or whoever.

Speaking of tragic heroes of the black-list era, I’m assuming that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – who, strangely, used ‘Werewolf of Paris’ author Guy Endore as his “beard” on this occasion – needs no introduction. Although Trumbo has found himself re-evaluated in recent years as a dignified man of letters and the subject of bittersweet, Oscar-bait biopic, his work here serves to remind us that, at its best, his writing wasn’t merely hard-boiled in the conventional sense, but mercilessly cynical and – if you’ll forgive the neologism - dark as fuck.

Systematically assaulting the fragile fictions that his characters use to keep their self-identifies intact, Trumbo’s screenplay for ‘He Ran all the Way’ eventually leaves all of the principal players brutally exposed, with barely a hint of authorial sympathy to fall back on.

Robey’s dysfunctional background for instance is sketched in about as concisely as is humanly possible. When we first meet him, he is in the process of being woken from his slumber, late in the morning, by his dissolute, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (a wonderful bit part from Gladys George, whom you may recall from her turn as Miles Archer’s wife in ‘The Maltese Falcon’).

“If you were a real man, you’d be out looking for a job,” she scolds her son. “If you were a man, I’d punch your teeth in,” he snaps back, before making a cheap shot about her looking worse for wear for her hangover. Oof. It’s hilarious to observe such a comically dysfunctional mother/son relationship, but, when it comes to figuring out how our protagonist ended up as such a mixed up, deadbeat punk, what more could we possibly need to know?

(We only meet Mrs Robey once more in the film incidentally, when the police come calling after Nick is identified as the perpetrator of the robbery. She appears to be enjoying a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, and basically tells them that she doesn’t give a damn if her son lives or dies. Nice lady, huh?)

Through the remainder of the film, Trumbo’s obsessive unpicking of character dynamics helps generate uniquely grim sense of tension, as the five participants in the confined, hot-house apartment set-up flex and pull against each other like the strands of a cat’s cradle. As Robey’s destabilising influence intensifies, all of the component relationships that make up the Dobbs family – father/son, daughter/parents, husband/wife – find themselves compromised and turned upside down.

Wallace Ford in particular does great work here as the father, Fred (‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ reference, anyone?), and the scenes that depict his young son’s respect for him disintegrating as he sacrifices his masculine authority by taking a cautious, safety-first approach to dealing with the killer in their midst, are heart-breaking.

Perversely, even as he threatens and insults them, Robey also seems to become fixated with the idea of gaining the family’s acceptance. Presumably recognising their home as the kind of loving, mutually supportive environment that he has so lacked in his own life, he finds himself trying to insert himself into their daily routine as if he were some long lost eldest son, sub-consciously framing Ward as a substitute for his own absent father figure, even as another part of him viciously mocks the older man for his passivity and supposed cowardice. It is only when Robey realises that this acceptance will – obviously – not be forthcoming that becomes enraged and turns to violence.

In all cases though, the characters gain a real depth as their desperation increases. During the early part of the film – before Robey first pulls a gun on the family - we’re inclined to wonder why Peggy Dobbs would tolerate his already slightly unhinged, passive-aggressive behaviour, even to the point of inviting him back home to meet her folks after their first meeting.

A later scene between Peggy and a co-worker at her bakery job however clarifies for us that she feels so starved of male attention, and is so lacking in the self-confidence to go out and find any herself, that, when Robey initially comes on to her at the pool, she’s so taken aback that she deliberately overlooks the atmosphere of violence and suspicion dripping off her new suitor, and, once their physical attraction to each other has been established, finds herself willing to do just about anything to stop him leaving without her… even though that is the very thing upon which her family’s safety depends.

In her own way, Peggy is revealed to be as desperate and self-deluding as Robey. Torn between the bosom of her family and the desire to break away and establish an independent life for herself, she represents something very different from the procession of femme fatales, wronged wives and dilettante daughters we normally encounter in film noir, and Winters – a consistently underrated performer who went on to play a long series of these “doomed, mixed up floozy” roles – makes her into just as much of a fascinating and unpredictable piece of work as Garfield does his character.

If ‘He Ran All The Way’ has one weakness, it is probably it’s tendency to veer toward one of those “filmed stage play” type movies that became all the rage on the more cerebral side of Hollywood during the 1950s, as the kind of resurgent theatre so beloved of Garfield began to exert a greater influence upon the industry. (You know, ‘All About Eve’, ’12 Angry Men’ - that sort of thing. Actually, Robert Aldrich’s 1954 film of Clifford Odets’ scabrous Hollywood bridge bonfire ‘The Big Knife’, with a thinly veiled analogue of John Garfield as its central character and Winters in a supporting role, is a perfect example too.)

Unlike some films in this vein however, ‘He Ran..’ rarely suffers too badly from its limited scope, and never feels anything less than thoroughly cinematic. Which brings us neatly the third corner of this movie’s black list triangle – the considerably less feted figure of director John Berry.

Unlike Garfield and Trumbo, Berry was only just beginning to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘name’ when the Feds came knocking (he directed the highly regarded noir ‘Tension’ in 1949), and as a result he seems to have struggled to make much headway after he returned from exile in France (where he directed several of the Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution movies) in the ‘70s, working only intermittently on a decidedly odd bunch of projects through until he slipped out of the industry in the ‘80s.

This is a shame, because, on the basis of his work here, Berry certainly had the necessary chops to have done some really great work, had circumstances been different. The opening scenes depicting the robbery and Garfield’s flight to the swimming baths are great examples of the kind of down-on-the-street location shooting that started to bring a new energy to noir and crime films from the late ‘40s onward, and his approach to blocking the action within the cramped apartment set within which the latter two thirds of the film take place remains novel and involving throughout.

Taking a few notes perhaps from John Huston’s old “power relationships expressed through the framing” jive in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Berry manages to keep the lid pushed down tight on the movie’s pressure cooker plotting, giving his actors enough space to let rip whilst never allowing things to boil over into melodrama.

The film’s quality is further enhanced meanwhile by some superb photography from the legendary James Wong Howe. Though he has relatively little to work during interior scenes, the few nocturnal exteriors we get to see, as the increasingly paranoid Robey sneaks glances through the blinds, seeing sinister figures passing in the night, look absolutely fantastic. Minimal lights gleams like liquid gold off the bonnets of pitch black automobiles as they slide through gaps in the deep, inky blackness, highlighting stark silhouettes lurking on the corners of the screen. It’s pure noir, and pure brilliance – a beautifully expressionistic method of shooting urban environments that Howe would go on to perfect a few years later in a similarly talky movie with a few rogue strands of noir lurking in its DNA, Alexander Mackendrick’s ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ (1957).

All of these strengths – Howe’s sleek visual poetry, Berry’s dynamic direction, Trumbo’s writing and a set of feverishly intense performances from the central cast - come together for what I believe has to be one of the greatest and most devastating ironic finales in all of film noir. I won’t spoil it for you here though, so instead let’s talk about the political undercurrents that – somewhat inevitably, under the circumstances – can be found lurking beneath the surface of this ostensibly simple story.

In view of the personnel involved, it’s not surprising to discover that ‘He Ran all the Way’ attracted the attention of our old friend Thom Anderson, who included it on the list of films he considered key exemplars of what he termed film gris - a short-lived trend of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that saw a small group of left-leaning filmmakers using the tropes of the low budget crime thriller to offer a critique of American capitalism, and to explore collectivist alternatives to Hollywood’s usual brand of heroic individualism.

Whereas pictures like Thieves Highway and Force of Evil were explicitly polemical in this regard however, ‘He Ran All The Way’ is a lot more circumspect, keeping things sub-textual for the most part. Indeed, it is easy to watch the film without even considering the possibility that it is trying to make a political point; I know that I certainly did. It was only later, noting that the film made it onto Anderson’s list and considering the background of the people who made it, that it got me thinking about just how well the hard-boiled crime idiom lends itself to an anti-capitalist message.

This isn’t exactly a new idea of course, and wouldn't have been in 1951 either. After all, the Warner Bros gangster films of the 1930s provide about as savage a critique of free market capitalism as could possibly be wished for, whilst many of Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining stories explore the human cost of greed and civic corruption. Specifically in terms of film noir though: where there is money, there are guns, and where there are guns, there is death (and sex, but that’s another story). It ain’t exactly a subtle equation, but what more could an aspiring socialist filmmaker need to get the ball rolling?

In ‘He Ran All The Way’, the Dobbs family seem happily devoid of any of these things when we first meet them. Although they clearly struggle to make ends meet, for the most part they seem satisfied with their lot in life, and I don’t think any family members mention money (or a lack thereof) at any point. They function as a tight-knit, collective unit, with each member keeping the well-being of the others in mind at all times.

When Nick Robey crashes into their life however, he brings money – loads of it. Flashing it around, boasting of how much he got away from the robbery with, he tries his best to revel in the status it confers. He also brings his gun of course, wielding it with all the shaky-handed, phallic substitute ‘certainty’ you’d expect. He mocks the family for their lack of ambition, for the drudgery of their dead-end jobs and for their failure to pursue their individual dreams (and, through his hold over Peggy, he brings the dangerous promise of sex into the picture too of course). Under the stress of his assault, the functionality of the family unit begins to deteriorate, as long repressed resentments and independent desires begin to surface.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Robey attempts to win the family’s gratitude by ordering in a lavish banquet for them. Like the sainted peasants in some revolutionary melodrama however, they take a united stand and refuse his food, recognising it as the fruit of his ill-gotten gains and returning to their own simple fare instead.

This of course sends Robey into a calamitous rage which sees his supposed gesture of kindness transformed into a weird new form of torture, as he forces his prisoners to eat the luxury food at gun point; a reflection perhaps of the way that, for all its promises of benevolent progress, American capitalism countenances no alternatives, having essentially spent the entire modern era refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer from the rest of the world.

Admittedly, it could be argued that the psychological complexity of the film’s characters makes such a straight allegorical reading problematic, but it’s certainly there if you want it, and it adds a particularly dark caste to the Dobbs family’s prospects of future unity after their trauma ends and the credits roll, given the nature of the circumstances that eventually lead to Robey receiving the tarmac-and-lead-based reward we know lays in store for all such independently motivated, overgrown J.D. psychopaths.

Looking back with almost seventy years-worth of retrospect, it seems deeply ironic that, whilst the McCarthyite assertion that Hollywood movies were subliminally spreading dangerous communist sedition has generally been judged by history as wrong-headed, paranoid hysteria, close textural analysis of a film like ‘He Ran all the Way’ might have helped give credence to all of HUAC’s worst fears.

As the final film on Anderson’s chronological list, ‘He Ran all the Way’ can be seen to represent the last gasp of ‘film gris’ before the blacklist shutters slammed down. As Nick Robey’s fist grabs at the air and his wild eyes close for the last time, it also bids farewell to one of the best – and certainly one of the most influential – actors of the noir era.

That’s quite a weight of historical significance for a quick n’ nasty low budget thriller to shoulder, but the movie itself is more than solid enough to take the load. Standing alongside ill-starred classics like ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950) and Ida Lupino’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ (1953), it is one of the very best crime movies to have emerged from this particular time and place.

Boxing Clever: Four Film Noir Classics (Arrow Academy / 2017)

I’m sure I must have griped before in these pages about the overly broad definition of the term “film noir” often employed in publicity materials for revival screenings and DVD/Blu-ray releases, and my fear that this misplaced enthusiasm may result in the (originally rather rarefied) ‘noir’ label being arbitrarily slapped on pretty much every black and white Hollywood film that is neither a comedy nor a musical.

So where DO we draw the line, I hear you ask? Well, more so even than other retrospectively applied genre boundaries, the dense web of thematic tropes, socio-cultural context and aesthetic devices that define each individual movie fan’s idea of ‘noir’ leaves one hell of unruly borderland territory, waiting to be claimed.

Rather like the equally fruitless arguments one could instigate over the exact point at which a film about some people killing some other people becomes a horror film though, we’re probably best to put the whole mess aside and just fall back on the old chestnut that we know it when we see it - an admittedly worthless, dumb-headed methodology that, happily, functions to kill any debate on the nature of the genre in question stone-dead, leaving us with no choice but to talk about the movie itself instead.

The exact same grimly reactionary get-out, you’ll note, soon becomes equally unavoidable when trying to nail down the nature of a “classic”, and as such -- after issuing a disclaimer that I always, always celebrate and commend lovingly restored releases of obscure, studio era American movies and am perfectly happy for labels to call them whatever the hell they please if it will help shift a few copies -- it is my sad duty to begin this review by advising consumers that, by my count, Arrow’s 2017 box set of ‘Four Film Noir Classics’ contains at best about one and a half noirs and two classics.

Regrettably moreover, it has taken me so long to get around to watching all of these films and writing about them that the box set in question is now long sold out. But, since it has now been replaced by individual releases of the four featured movies, I hope that perhaps my belated reflections may still prove helpful in helping some noir-curious readers to push their shekels in the right direction and avoid the pitfalls, who knows. So without further ado, let’s quit mixin’ metaphors and get stuck in.

Though it was released in the same year as his twin masterpieces ‘The Spiral Staircase’ and ‘The Killers’, even the most ardent defender of Robert Siodmak’s legacy would have difficulty boosting 1946’s The Dark Mirror much beyond the level of a minor curiosity within the filmography of this retrospectively revered director.

A glib and rather airless identical twins murder mystery whose logic revolves primarily around a series of unlikely coincidences, ‘The Dark Mirror’ was adapted from what we must presume was a similarly uninspired magazine story (by French scriptwriter Vladimir Pozner) and showcases Hollywood’s unsavoury late ‘40s fixation with mental illness and psychoanalysis (cf: ‘Spellbound’, etc.) at its most naïve and schematic.

As our nominal protagonist, head-shrink and “twin expert” Lew Ayres comes across as smug, sleazy and, most chronically, boring in his attempts to determine which of the two available Olivia de Havillands [“good” (demure, introverted) or “bad” (pushy, aggressive) varieties] iced some dude in his study, even as the film seems to expect us to be enthralled by his Rorschach tests and interminable (Production Code-acceptable) Freud-for-Dummies type musings.

Dialogue-heavy and largely confined to a handful of cramped interior sets, much of ‘The Dark Mirror’ feels like stuff that could have been repurposed for an episode of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ a few decades later, making it a profoundly skippable business for general 21st century viewers. I confess I would have been pretty angry if I’d shelled out £15 for Arrow’s stand-alone release expecting a “film noir classic”, but as part of a box set it proved diverting enough. Indeed, for Siodmak completists, researchers into the history of “evil twin” movies (definite precursors for both ‘Sisters’ and ‘Dead Ringers’ here I feel), or merely fans of the darker side of ‘40s Hollywood melodrama in general, there are still a few redeeming features to be enjoyed herein.

Most notably, de Havilland’s performance is, frankly, excellent. She differentiates and humanises her two characters in a far more convincing manner than the script really deserves, shouldering most of the burden when it comes to creating the ambiguities between them that drive the film’s suspense factor. Meanwhile, the camera trickery used to accomplish the scenes in which both de Havillands are on screen together is frequently ingenious, never drawing attention to itself or upsetting the flow of the drama; effects-wise, it feels like a master-class in how to do this sort of thing well that would stand up even today.

Siodmak too was clearly still on top of his game here despite the dreary material and what I presume must have been a fairly meagre production budget, occasionally busting loose with some of his trademark dramatic intensity for a few great, cinematic flourishes. The most memorable of these takes us almost into gothic horror territory, recalling ‘The Spiral Staircase’ as a nocturnal shot of a forlorn figure in the apartment building’s front garden pulls back through an upstairs window to reveal a startling shot of one of the sisters wielding a dagger with clearly malicious intent, moonlight glinting off the blade.

Milton Krasner’s photography is exceptional here, and we should also throw in a word here for Dimitri Tiomkin’s music, which adds greatly to the atmosphere, exploring more interesting territory than the blaring guff that more commonly accompanied films of this era.

The lengthy tracking shot that opens the film, in which the camera prowls slowly through the study of the murder victim, highlighting various clues before eventually revealing the corpse itself, is fantastic too – a bravura opening to any murder mystery, and one of the only moments in which ‘The Dark Mirror’ really approaches anything resembling “noir”, incidentally.

Next up, we get both an even more concentrated dose of faux-psychoanalytical melodrama and another misfire from a legendary director, as we turn to Fritz Lang’s rather more ambitious Secret Beyond The Door (1947).

In my experience, Lang’s American films almost always make for rewarding viewing, irrespective of how they were received at the time, but sadly I feel we still need to chalk this one up as one of his few absolute disasters. In financial terms, the film’s catastrophic box office pretty much torpedoed Lang’s tempestuous filmmaking partnership with producer Walter Wanger and star Joan Bennett, just a year after they’d delivered such classics as ‘Scarlet Street’ and ‘The Woman in the Window’. And, in creative terms meanwhile, well… let’s get to that.

Essentially Lang’s contribution to the cycle of ‘Jane Eyre’-derived “woman-marries-a-cad” gothic potboilers that followed the success of Hitchcock and Selznick’s ‘Rebecca’ in 1945, ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ (scripted by Lang protégée Silvia Richards from a story by Rufus King) begins in provocative fashion when Celia (Bennett), a young bachelorette holidaying in Mexico, finds herself unexpectedly aroused by a knife fight she witnesses on the street, and, more specifically, by the eye contact she simultaneously makes with one Mark Lamphire (Michael Redgrave), a tall, dark stranger of aristocratic bearing and obvious wealth.

Before you know it, Bennett and Redgrave are hitched, but, as is the way with these things, our heroine’s new beau remains a man of mystery, refusing to discuss his background and inconveniently disappearing “on business” at the point at which (we may infer) the couple are about to consummate their relationship during their South of the border honeymoon. Things get far worse however when Celia returns, alone, to her husband’s East Coast ancestral pile, there to discover a stack of unsavoury surprises that would have had Daphne Du Maurier reaching for the smelling salts.

Not only does Mr Lamphire keep a resentful, black-clad sister (Anne Revere) mooning about the place, he also has a preternaturally mature, Village-of-the-Damned-esque son, born to his previously unmentioned first wife(!), who, Celia learns following a bare minimum of investigative snooping, died in mysterious circumstances on the premises some years back(?!). (1)

As if this weren’t enough make any sane woman to consider getting the hell out of Dodge, Celia’s husband also chooses the occasion of a big society party he is hosting to casually drop the big reveal vis-a-vis his rather unique hobby, which – get this – involves collecting murder rooms.

In other words, he has travelled the world purchasing the entire contents of rooms in which notorious crimes have taken place, and has arranged for them to be recreated in a wing of his own house, just because… well, I don’t know exactly. The script posits the idea that he is some kind of holistic architect with an interest in exploring how the resonance of certain rooms can affect the events within them, or some such hoo-hah he seems to have dreamed up to avoid the more obvious conclusion that he is simply out of his fucking mind - a suggestion that he airily dismisses when it is put to him in slightly more polite, cod-Freudian terms by a female party guest identified on the movie’s cast-list solely as “Intellectual Sub-Deb”.

In case you’re keeping score, Celia also overhears rumours at the party suggesting that her husband has squandered his fortune, run the family business into the ground and is now embroiled in insurmountable debt. And, did I mention that he also has a final, locked “murder room” that he will never, ever let anyone into? Can you guess what might be inside it?

As my own wife is often keen on yelling at the screen when we watch horror films together, now is very much the time for Celia to GO! GET OUT! LEAVE THIS PLACE, RIGHT NOW! But of course, in genre-mandated fashion, she fails to follow such advice because, well, you know – love, or something.

I confess, reading back through that plot synopsis, ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ sounds like an absolute hoot. With such a ludicrously OTT plot-line, heaps of gothic atmosphere and one of cinema’s great visionaries in the director’s chair, *surely* this thing must be ripe for rediscovery, regardless of how poorly it was received upon release...? Well, so you’d hope, but, in view of these obvious attractions, I fear the fact the film remains largely obscure speaks volumes.

Basically, ‘Secret…’ is hard work. Full of tepid, overwrought dialogue and repetitious, circular plotting, Richards’ screenplay attempts to graft garbled psycho-analytical “insight” onto the bones of a rote Victorian melodrama, but crucially fails to make its central characters or their errant behaviour either believable or sympathetic, resulting in a lugubrious trudge of a picture in which pages of script seem to disintegrate into a mushy, interchangeable swamp of blather.

I mean, I realise gothic romance is *supposed* to be leaden and suffocating to some degree, but, to paraphrase that guy in the pie shop scene in Smashing Time, there are limits, darling - limits.

Bennett and Redgrave do what they can with their roles, but humanising their characters proves impossible, and as a result these are “stay professional and wait for the cheque” performances for the most part. After ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ opened to an understandable mixture of bafflement and ridicule, certain gossip columnists seem to have taken pleasure in noting that Redgrave, who had the misfortune to select this film as his American debut after achieving star status in the UK, pretty much packed it in and took the first boat home straight after the production wrapped. (Seemingly taking a “once bitten, twice shy” approach, he only rarely accepted roles in American films thereafter.)(2)

Unable to harness the tightly-wound threads of inescapable, mechanized urban fate that powered his better films through to their conclusions, Lang also flounders, filling the movie – for some reason – with over-bearing floral imagery (which I suppose at least suits the musty potpourri of some of the scripting). More helpfully, he also really goes to town with all the stuff involving keyholes, nocturnal snooping, locked chambers, shadowed empty spaces and malevolent architecture, harking back to the more expressionistic elements of his early German films to deliver some extremely atmospheric sequences.

Indeed, there are isolated moments here when we could be lost in one of the circuitous human rat-traps stalked by Dr Mabuse and his victims, but, with no other aspects of the production apparently able to back up the director’s instinct for cinematic wizardry, these remain only moments - exhilarating intervals between leaden stretches of run-time that see us lost in a far less pleasurable manner, sinking again into the murk of the confused, unworkable script. Although Lang completists and Hollywood disaster specialists will no doubt want to give ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ a shot, I’m afraid I can’t report that it has improved much with age.

And, as far as ‘film noir’ is concerned meanwhile… well I’ve watched kitten videos on Youtube that have more claim to the term to be honest. Even if one were to use a wholly psychological definition of ‘noir’, I can’t really see ‘Secret..’s half-baked mixture of pop Freudianism and 19th century melodrama hitting the mark, and, as a voluntary member of the Genre Police, I can’t help but take a dim view of this sort of thing. I mean, if this one gets through the gates, I suppose that means you’ve also got to make room for its obvious precursor ‘Rebecca’, and if we let her in, where does it end? ‘Dragonwyck’? ‘The Good Earth’…? Hell, why not throw ‘Jamaica Inn’ in too, and we’ll have a right old rave up at the next Film Noir retrospective?

Far closer to the mark – on the surface of things, at least – is Force of Evil (1948). As well as boasting a suitably generic pulp fiction title, playwright and screenwriter Abraham Polonsky’s directorial debut brings us claustrophobic New York location shooting, some bracing gangland gun-play, a morally compromised, mob-affiliated lawyer living in fear of the secret telephone in his bottom drawer, and – crucially – a whole lot of stuff with cheroot-chewing guys in hats talking about “the numbers racket”. Now *this* is more like it!

As a committed Marxist intellectual and trade union activist however, Polonsky was certainly no Spillane, and his film – the only directorial assignment he completed before becoming one of the earliest victims of the HUAC blacklist - tilts at some far more ambitious windmills than your average gangster movie.

We’ve spoken before here [in my review of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway] about critic Thom Anderson’s conception of film gris, a term he coined to refer a certain set of films produced on the outskirts of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1940s, exploiting a brief window in which left wing directors and writers were given the opportunity to produce work that reflected their ideological beliefs, before the black curtain of McCarthyism fell.

Reshaping the conventions of lower budget thrillers from the inside out, entries in the film gris canon presented viewers – and indeed studios – with a series of challenging, formally innovative films that often sought to undercut traditional Hollywood notions of individual exceptionalism, instead exploring wider ideas of societal responsibility and encouraging the audience to identify with a collective social grouping rather than a lone hero. ‘Thieves’ Highway’ provides a good example of this short-lived trend, but ‘Force of Evil’ can make a pretty good case for being the definitive one.

Extrapolated by Polonsky from a reportedly impenetrable anti-capitalist novel (‘Tucker’s People’ by Ira Wolfert, 1941), the film follows the increasingly desperate travails of one Joe Morse, played by perennial film gris leading man John Garfield. An ambitious young New York lawyer from working class roots, Morse is in the pocket of high-rolling gangster Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts), helping him mastermind a scheme that will see his organisation obtaining monopoly control over the city’s underground “numbers racket”, wiping out the competition in one fell swoop. Everything is set to go off without a hitch, but for the nagging guilt Joe feels about the plight of his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez), who runs a small numbers game in a down-at-heel part of town, and stubbornly refuses to sell out to the gangsters.

Although presenting an exploitative illegal gambling operation as a bulwark of grass roots community enterprise feels like a weird move on Polonsky’s part, you can probably guess the general direction of the story’s drift, as Joe Morse struggles to find a way to salvage his brother’s livelihood without blowing the whole takeover deal to the unexpectedly determined NYPD. Needless to say, the constrictions of the increasingly convoluted knots he finds himself tied up in provide the framework for some stone cold bits of noir greatness, including a least a few sequences that are liable to live long in the memory of even the most apolitical movie fan.

The contrast between the film’s towering Manhattan exteriors (exceptionally captured by DP George Barnes) and its cramped, utilitarian studio interiors (largely offices and places of work, rather than domestic settings) lends the film an oppressive, airless feel that persists throughout, effectively – if not exactly subtly – mirroring the fateful weight that the machinations of capitalist self-interest place upon the characters within it.

Though Barnes’ photography never fully commits to the kind of expressionism favoured by so much ‘classic’ noir, instead staying true to the story’s tone of grimy realism, the climactic scene in which the craven numbers bank accountant who snitched to the cops meets his bloody fate nonetheless achieves a near-operatic quality, as does the concluding sequence in which Garfield symbolically ‘descends to the underworld’ as he climbs down to the banks of the Hudson, there to search for his brother’s corpse.

The sequences set in Morse’s office meanwhile are genuinely nightmarish, as a grim ballet of telephones, locked drawers, handguns and light switches threatens to upset his house of cards at any moment, temporarily making the movie feel like an anxiety dream someone might experience after guzzling too much cheese from the buffet at a Film Noir festival.

Despite these strengths however – and despite the mighty critical reputation ‘Force of Evil’ has acquired over the years (a charge led by no less a figure than Martin Scorsese, who has firmly enshrined it as one of his key influences and all-time faves) – personally speaking, I couldn’t help but feel that the film never *quite* comes together the way it should, with its basic cogency perhaps collapsing to some extent under the weight of its own ambitions.

Although the background Polonsky’s script provides on the ubiquitous “numbers racket” is pretty enlightening for us non-U.S.-based crime fiction enthusiasts, the doggedly economic nature of the film’s plotting sometimes proves difficult to match up with its aspirations toward compelling human drama - a problem that is only exacerbated by the distinctly peculiar approach that Polonsky takes to the film’s dialogue.

Though he remains ostensibly within the realm of contemporary, street level vernacular here (there are none of the baroque excesses later exemplified by Clifford Odet’s script for ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ (1954), for instance), the writer-director nonetheless has his cast communicate with each other via the means of rhythmic, repetitious and frequently rather obtuse passages of verbiage that scan more like blank verse than anything you’d expect to hear in a hard-boiled crime movie.

Creating an odd disjuncture with the studied, proletarian realism of the story and setting, this technique serves – perhaps deliberately? - to alienate us from any real identification with the characters, as climactic inter-character scenes begin to play out more like symbolic representations of some obscure philosophical point than as exchanges between actual human beings.

Garfield’s scenes with ostensible leading lady Beatrice Pearson (whom he first encounters working as a secretary in his brother’s numbers bank) suffer particularly badly in this regard; although Joe Morse is a very well-drawn character in his own right, the basis for his continued interaction with Pearson’s rather unconvincing stock ‘good girl’ seems entirely inexplicable, and the strange dialogue they are assigned only serves to confuse the issue, leaving our emotive response to their joint story arc seriously adrift. (Seriously, if someone can tell me what the scene in which Garfield picks Pearson up and forces her to sit on a mantelpiece whilst some passers-by emerge from the lift is all about, I’d be delighted.)

It seems depressingly ironic that a film which so bravely seeks to dramatise the damage that the capitalist system can inflict upon the souls of those caught up in it should sacrifice the humanity of its characters to some bits of business that feel like they could have emerged from an experimental one-act stage play. On this basis, I must confess that, on first exposure at least, I found ‘Force of Evil’ a film far easier to admire than it was to love. Perhaps repeat viewings might help to open it up for me, but… who has the time? I gotta make a living to keep buying all these blu-rays, y’know. [Head hits desk; drooling.]

And finally, we move forward seven years, to a film from the very opposite end of the noir spectrum from ‘Force of Evil’ – one that is perhaps less than wholly admirable in certain respects, but is oh so easy to love.

Mr. Brown: I think Lieutenant Diamond needs a drink. Got any liquor?
Fante: How about some paint thinner?
Mr. Brown: No, that'll kill him. Anything else?
Fante: Hair tonic, 40% alcohol.
Mr. Brown: Fine.

Welcome to the world of Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo – a film so goddamn hard-boiled it basically feels like being lamped in the jaw by a giant amalgam of Humphrey Bogart and Dashiell Hammett… presumably whilst you were lurking under a lamppost after midnight, chewing on a matchstick and waiting to give Elisha Cook Jr a hard time, or something.

By 1955 of course, film noir was well into what I suppose you might call its ‘decadent’ phase, with such self-conscious apotheoses of the style as Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ and Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil’ lurking just around the corner, so it’s more than likely that Lewis and his collaborators were fully aware of the clichéd nature of the genre conventions they were exploiting here. Still though, ‘The Big Combo’ stands as such a perfect, eternal archetype of the no nonsense, low budget crime movie that it is difficult to cast too much post-modern shade across its achievements. Indeed, most contemporary viewers seem to have taken it on its own terms, with reviewers writing it off as a dated throwback to the gangster movies of preceding decades, differentiated from them only by its Production Code-baiting infusions of violence and perversity. So, exactly what the doctor ordered to liven up this rather lacklustre box set, in other words.

Before I get too carried away with hyperbole however, I should make probably make clear that, unlike the other films in this set, my own personal history with ‘The Big Combo’ goes back a long way. All the way back to when I was seventeen years old in fact, and taking a module on Film Noir whilst studying for my A-Level in Film Studies.

Alongside the obligatory classics of the genre, our tutor was canny enough to screen her own copy of ‘The Big Combo’ (recorded, I believe, from a ‘Moviedrome’ TV broadcast) for the class, and I am eternally grateful to her for that because, more so than ‘Mildred Pierce’ and ‘The Big Sleep’ and so on, it was the one that made by far the biggest impression upon me. In fact I’m go so far as to say that it provided me with perhaps my first real exposure to the joys of the vintage pulp crime aesthetic in film and literature, and, if you want to click on the crime tag at the bottom of this post, you’ll appreciate the effect that ended up having on me, for better or for worse.

Returning to ‘The Big Combo’ after many years via Arrow’s blu-ray, I’ve been thrilled to discover that it hasn’t lost its lustre in the slightest. If anything in fact, I love it even more. Of course, with so much more movie-watching experience under my belt, I can now identify the film’s numerous shortcomings all too clearly; the occasional absurdities of the plotting, the crippling time and budgetary constraints under which production took place, the clumsy use of insert shots to try to break up Lewis’s reliance on one scene / one take master shots, and so on.

All of these issues make the film an easy one to tear apart from a purely technical POV, but I would nonetheless argue that such deficiencies don’t detract from its overall impact in the slightest, any more than wonky type-setting and poorly printed artwork affect the impact of a good pulp paperback.

Fittingly, the film’s central plot line is pretty boilerplate stuff, with obsessive cop-on-the-edge Lieutenant Leo Diamond (Cornel Wilde) working round to bring down shark-like criminal kingpin Mr Brown (we never learn his first name), played with scene-stealing gusto by Richard Conte. Essentially reprising his capricious hooligan role from Siodmak’s excellent ‘Cry of the City’ (1948), but adding an extra decade or two’s criminal mastery to the equation, Conte amps up his performance here to wild, comic-book proportions, creating one of the most delightfully OTT villains the noir canon has to offer.

First introduced as he bawls out a failing boxing protégée backstage at the ring (“Hate! Hate is the word, Benny! Hate the man that tries to beat you. Kill 'em, Benny! Kill 'em!”), Mr Brown’s whip-snap dialogue delivery, unpredictable mood swings and ‘might is right’ philosophical diatribes serve to dominate the movie just as surely as he dominates his underlings and associates (“first is first – second is nothing!” serves as his preferred catch phrase).

Mr Brown seems to operate some sort of hypnotic sexual control over leading lady Jean Wallace, and keeps a hidden vault full of cash and machine guns in her apartment(!). He kills and tortures without hesitation, dines alone in his own hotel, and chews his lobster with vengeful intensity. He is awesome, basically.

Naturally, Mr Brown gets to chew his way through much of the best dialogue in Philip Yordan’s script, wherein characters snarl their way through blunt, Spillane-style verbiage that may seem clumsy and artless compared to more high-brow, literate noirs, but nonetheless remains richly quotable, full of beautiful chunks of ramshackle pulp poetry.

(The film’s quotes page on IMDB will give you a general idea of what to expect, but misses out on one of my favourite bits, when Diamond tries to bully Brown’s ex-wife into testifying against him by relating the way he accidentally had a woman gunned down in Diamond’s apartment; “…they took eleven bullets from her body, and the following morning Miss Lowell had breakfast with him – he ordered bacon and two eggs. Tell her Susan, how he ate his bacon and eggs while he read the papers, and saw the body of this girl lying in the morgue!”)(3)

As I’ve stated before in these pages, I’m often a little distrustful of the kind of “A picture” noirs that placed their literary/artistic credentials front and centre. As with ‘Force of Evil’ discussed above, such an approach can easily lead to films becoming top heavy with signage and symbolism, knocking their function of fast-moving crime stories off-balance. As such, I personally tend to prefer the kind of less showy, second or third tier noirs that ostensibly keep it simple whilst letting weird ambiguities and psychological complexities creep in around the edges – and of course ‘The Big Combo’ is a case in point in this regard.

Though the script is doggedly straight-forward, crudely melodramatic and frequently preposterous, that doesn’t mean it’s stupid. As many critics have noted, there is more to the drama of ‘The Big Combo’ than initially meets the eye, as the plotting becomes increasingly motivated by a streak of weird, wilful perversity that consumes every character within it.

A sweaty, self-righteous and generally dislikeable protagonist, Wilde’s Lt. Diamond can’t hold a candle to the charisma of Mr Brown – indeed, his campaign against the latter seems to be motivated at least partly by pure jealousy, and the purity of his intentions is placed in doubt from the outset. As soon as he is introduced, Diamond’s superior officer accuses him of pursuing the case against Brown because he is “in love” with Brown’s mistress Susan Lowell, an accusation he fails to deny, but it later transpires that he has never even met her at this point.

As he proceeds to mercilessly harangue Lowell in her hospital bed following a suicide attempt, and to harass her with sanctimonious life advice at every opportunity thereafter, Diamond seems closer to a persistent stalker than a crusading cop, whilst Lowell herself, caught between the vampiric attentions of two hot-headed, chauvinistic bullies, spends most of the movie lost in a precarious fug of suicidal depression – an effect unsettlingly conveyed by Jean Wallace’s dazed, affectless performance.

As for Mr Brown’s “big combo” itself meanwhile, budgetary constraints may have limited it to only three guys, but boy, what a crew they are. For a movie of this vintage, the frankness with which the homosexual relationship between Brown’s goons/triggermen Fante and Mingo (Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman) is portrayed is little short of breath-taking, not least in the way the film refuses to assign any conventional signifiers of “camp” to their characters, instead placing their relationship solely within a relentlessly masculine framework of sadism and physical intimidation.

A fascinating addition to the film, Fante and Mingo remind me strongly of the characters played by Gig Young and Helmut Dantine in Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia’ two decades later, but happily they are thankfully given a lot more screen-time here. In fact, the fleeting moments of tenderness they share inbetween acts of hair-raising violence represent perhaps the only expressions of a healthy, reciprocal love in the entire movie, even as Van Cleef’s glowering, hawk-like visage looking more menacing than ever as it emerges from the shadows of John Alton’s exceptional spot-lighting.

Even more compelling in some ways however is their supposed overseer Joe McClure, played by Brian Donlevy. Donlevy appears here mere months before he found himself catastrophically miscast in the first of Hammer’s Quatermass movies, but ‘The Big Combo’ proves that the big oaf was actually still capable of delivering an effective performance, irrespective of seven decades of stick he has subsequently received from British science fiction fans.

A hulking, huffing case study in brutish frustration and ineffectual low cunning, McClure, like Fante and Mingo, is a figure who refuses to fall easily into any pre-existing genre cliché. More than just the ready-made fall guy he could have been, McClure is an ugly spiked mass of conflicting negative emotions, and the faltering half smile he gives to Brown before he is (inevitably) gunned down prior to the film’s conclusion is, for me, the most haunting moment in any of the films on this box set.

As if this cast of misfits wasn’t already enough to keep us busy, ‘The Big Combo’ also finds room to assign some choice supporting roles to a bunch of great character actors (Jay Adler, John Hoyt, Ted de Corsica), but despite all this, most critics and fans over the years have been in agreement that the movie’s MVP can actually be found behind the camera, in the shape of the aforementioned John Alton.

Perhaps the pre-eminent example of a ‘cult’ cinematographer, Alton’s distinctive visual style significantly enhanced all of the numerous low budget noirs he worked on (cf: ‘Raw Deal’, ‘T-Men’, ‘Border Incident’), but ‘The Big Combo’, the last film in this vein he worked on, is perhaps his greatest achievement.

Shot almost entirely on cramped studio sets, ‘..Combo’ lacks the strong geographic identity of most urban crime stories (though the action ostensibly takes place in Los Angeles, you’ll have to work hard to actually find evidence of this), but Alton nonetheless uses the minimal means at his disposal to conjure a world of incredible, near-fantastical atmospherics. This being a horror-centric blog, I hope I can state that Alton’s work here makes ‘The Big Combo’ sometimes feel like a noir made by Mario Bava, and readers will appreciate the extent of the compliment.

Not only can other low budget filmmakers take inspiration from the way in which Alton creates a concert hall, the exterior of a boxing arena and an airport out of absolutely nothing and does so convincingly enough to sell the illusion to all but the most critical viewers, but the stark, hyper-real artistry of his light and shade – strong, carefully-directed light sources picking out details amid deep pools of black and swathes of studio fog – is frequently magnificent.

My favourite bit in this regard might possibly be the scene supposedly shot in the side alley of a burlesque club where Wilde’s on-off girlfriend (splendidly played by Helene Stanton, incidentally) works. It’s just… well, wow, basically. So richly evocative of… something; like the cover of a ‘50s Jim Thompson paperback come to life. (And yes, whilst he’s been stalker-ishly pursuing a suicidal gangster’s moll, Lt Diamond also has an on-off stripper girlfriend whom he treats like dirt – our moral high ground-hogging hero, ladies and gents.)

Joseph Lewis’s potential status as an auteur has long been a contentious topic amongst cinephiles, and whilst I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring here, I think we can at least say for certain that the handful of noteworthy films he made amid a career of less distinguished journeyman work (alongside ‘The Big Combo’, we can definitely add ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950) and ‘Terror in a Texas Town’ (1958) to the former category) share a sense of raw energy and transcendent pulp imagery that can’t simply have been the result of good luck and talented collaborators.

All three of these films attack the tropes of their genres with an exultant, gutsy determination that overcomes their (often considerable) technical shortcomings, zeroing in on the core of action, suspense and ragged emotional turmoil that makes such stories work, and imbuing them with a spirit of violent sensationalism that makes them feel closer to 70s/80s “cult movies” than studio-era “classics” – an approach that continues to endear Lewis’s films to viewers today, even whilst the work of most of his contemporaries in the Hollywood b-movie trenches has faded into oblivion.

Combine this feel with Alton’s sublime, quintessentially noir photography and a generous handful of bug-eyed, vein-popping performances and you’ve got a movie that may not be one of the best crime movies made in Hollywood by any stretch of the imagination, but – if your tastes are anything like mine – it stands a pretty high chance of becoming one of your favourite ones.

If you’ve seen ‘The Big Combo’, you’ll know what’s what, but if you haven’t – now is as good a time as any to embrace this twisted, two-dimensional sideshow of sadism, fear and despair, and feel the love.

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(1) Interestingly, Anne Revere seems to have played more or less the same role in the same year’s equally ‘Rebecca’-inspired ‘Dragonwyck’, starring Vincent Price in the all-important ‘cad’ role. Did she make a specialty of resentful, black-clad spinsters?

(2) Actually, I believe ‘Secret..’ was technically Redgrave’s second Hollywood appearance, following Eugene O'Neill’s wonderfully titled ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ for RKO, also in 1947. He certainly did stay away for a long time though – by my calculations, his next U.S. studio-backed picture was, appropriately enough, ‘The Quiet American’ in 1958, and even that was filmed in Vietnam and Italy.

(3) Yordan’s authorship of the script for ‘The Big Combo’ has often been disputed, on the basis that he frequently lent his name to work by black-listed writers, but “noirchaeologist” Eddie Muller, in his commentary track for the Arrow disc, states that he thinks it likely Yordan DID actually write most of it, so who am I to argue?

Arrow Round up: Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Though the precise boundaries of “film noir” within modern movie-chat are nebulous at best (and seem to become more so each year, as the genre’s key era sinks further into history), I’m afraid I’ve got to raise my hand from the outset here and say that I don’t believe Jules Dassin’s ‘Thieves’ Highway’ – trumpeted as being “as tough as noir gets” in Arrow’s marketing materials – fits the category at all. In terms of imagery, worldview and subject matter, we’re looking at something quite different here… unless one were to expand the concept of “noir” to include every black & white Hollywood film that takes a somewhat cynical approach to life.

Not that I blame Arrow (or anyone else who has marketed this film over the years) for hitting the “noir” button. Based on plot synopsis alone, Dassin’s film is admittedly a bit of a hard sell, and this was apparently the case even on the film’s original release, when, despite glowing critical notices, local exhibitors in the US had a devil of a time actually getting people into cinemas to see the damn thing.

In one of the supplements to Arrow’s edition, critic Frank Krutnik makes the case for reclassifying ‘Thieves Highway’ under the banner of what is apparently known as “film gris” – a designation that I was previously unaware of. Coined by film scholar Thom Anderson, this term has been applied chiefly to a set of films released in-between the two Hollywood HUAC hearings in 1947 and 1951, wherein a clique of broadly left-leaning directors, keeping a low profile in the realm of the low budget crime programmers and to some extent shielded from criticism by sympathetic producers, turned away from the existential / individualist concerns of “classic” noir, and instead began to offer up a thinly veiled critique of American capitalism and the corrupt social interactions it encourages. (John Huston’s ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950), itself an obvious precursor to Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955), would seem a key text here.)

Though it is not really a crime film in the conventional sense, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ would indeed seem to hit this alternative category with a perfect bulls-eye.

More than anything however, Dassin’s film reminded me of another movie by a blacklisted American director exiled in Europe (as Dassin would be shortly after finishing this film), Cy Endfield’s ‘Hell Drivers’ (1957). Like that film, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ is in some ways chiefly notable for the way in which it takes incredibly mundane subject matter – in this case, the travails of self-employed truck drivers transporting cargos of fruit from Fresno orchards to the San Francisco produce market – and crafts it into a compelling, tough guy adventure story.

Whereas ‘Hell Drivers’ takes a wildly pulpy, OTT approach to this task though, ‘Thieves Highway’ emerges as a little more… down to earth? Like the film’s hero Nick Garcos (played by Richard Conte), scriptwriter A.I. Bezzerides (‘They Drive By Night’, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’) was himself a second generation Greek immigrant whose father ran trucks of fruit between Fresno and San Francisco, and, like Garcos, Bezzerides also took up the yoke of the family business before Hollywood dough allowed him to make it as a professional writer.

As such, it’s a fair bet that a hefty chunk of autobiography made its way into both Bezzerides’ source novel (‘Thieves’ Market’ - published in ’48) and the script he developed it into. Certainly, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ carries a sense of realism and an attention to the day-to-day realities of working class life that is rare indeed in ‘40s Hollywood product, compressed into a sparse, forward-driving narrative that is gutsy enough to remain surprisingly compelling to this day.

By all accounts, one of Bezzerides’ overriding concerns as a writer lay in using his position to expose the multitude of “rip offs” foisted upon the common man at every level of society (a goal to which the crime/gangster genre is uniquely suited, needless to say), and with ‘Thieves’ Market’ / ‘Thieves’ Highway’ (note the pointed change in emphasis between the novel and movie titles) we can assume he landed the opportunity to do so more directly than at any other point in his writing career.

The film begins with Nick Garcos returning home from a stint in the navy to discover that his good-natured, easily manipulated father has been crippled after being sent home drunk in a sabotaged truck by his duplicitous creditors, and from that point on the movie is a roll-call of hard luck cases, from the immigrant farmers & fruit pickers being scammed on their produce by fast-talking truckers, to Nick’s partner Ed (Millard Mitchell) struggling to get to market in a jalopy “held together with spit”, to his fiancée (Barbara Lawrence), who flies to SF on the promise of marriage the next morning, only to find her would-be groom has been rolled by thugs for his newly acquired fortune and is recuperating in a prostitute’s apartment.

All of these are struggling, hardworking and sympathetically portrayed characters, but all are still clambering over each other to make a fast buck, whilst the apples they’re fighting over fly off the back of the trucks a tight corner, or sit rotting in the sun. Although ‘Thieves’ Highway’ never gets preachy or overtly political for a second, the script’s implications regarding the wasteful and corrupting nature of life in America could scarcely be clearer, whilst the fact that just about everybody on screen is a first or second generation immigrant adds a poignant verisimilitude to the portrayal of a treacherous world in which everyone seems to some extent an outsider.

Particularly pertinent in this regard is the late entry of Rica (celebrated Italian actress Valentina Cortese in her American debut), the aforementioned prostitute who, uh, ‘befriends’ Nick (this was a Code era picture remember) upon his arrival in San Francisco. A strange character whose introduction shifts the emphasis of the movie considerably, Rica doesn’t ring even remotely true as a lonely French (huh?) woman supposedly turning tricks in an apartment above a fruit market. In fact, it’s fair to say that Cortese’s performance seems to belong to an entirely different movie (a more elegant, sexually charged European one, to be precise) from the tough guy trucking stuff that surrounds it.

I can’t quite fathom Dassin's intention in placing such heavy emphasis on Cortese’s character in the second half of the film - the story of her romance with Nick certainly proves very difficult to reconcile with the otherwise sparse and fast-moving revenge narrative – but I’m hesitant to write her inclusion off entirely as a misjudgment, as her scenes with Conte undoubtedly have a certain frisson all of their own, adding a new dimension to the film that seems a deliberate attempt to take things in a potentially interesting direction, even if it is ultimately too tonally jarring and undermined by Production Code censorship to fully succeed.

Thinking further in fact, the notion that the hero of ‘Thieves’ Highway’ chucks his blonde, materialistic wife-to-be in order to take up with an iterant and melancholic woman of foreign extraction and questionable virtue – and for the new couple to furthermore be gifted with a deeply unconvincing “drive into the sunset” happy ending – seems a provocative addition to the edgy political subtext that can be extrapolated from the rest of the film.

Speaking of that revenge narrative meanwhile, for the sake of convenience the film’s assorted evils are all stacked at the door of crooked San Fran produce dealer Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), an archetypal manipulative capitalist bully whose greedy scheming sees him regularly skirting the edges of the law. Whilst Nick’s dogged campaign to take him down comes with a pleasantly raw tang of “revenge of the downtrodden” vengeance about it, I feel that one of the few shortcomings of Bezzerides’ excellent script is his failure to “take things higher” in terms of delineating the chain of “rip-offs” at work in the produce market by bringing in the forces (whether cops, gangsters or local government) who are in turn leaning on Figlia, rather than leaving him as the end-of-the-line vis-à-vis the movie’s villainy.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Bezzerides himself was not to blame for this oversight (I’ve not read his source novel, so can’t compare the two). As appropriate as it may seem to modern viewers, explicitly calling out federal corruption and/or the influence of organized crime on market forces might well have pushed this already politically dicey property way beyond the studio’s comfort zone in this particularly sensitive era of American history.

As a director, Dassin always seemed to at drawing us into the precise mechanics of closed-system, masculine worlds – whether the high security prison of ‘Brute Force’ (1947), or the definitive police procedural of ‘The Naked City’ (’48) – and his depiction of the California trucking / fruit trading world in ‘Thieves’ Highway’ is equally vivid and believable.

Like many classic Hollywood directors, Dassin’s stylistic flourishes are all but invisible, but their contribution to the film’s overall effectiveness is profound. As in many of his films, the extensive (and, at the time, still quite novel) use of location shooting proves extremely beneficial, and, on the level of pure cinema, ‘Thieves Highway’ remains a blast, despite its potentially dispiriting subject matter.

Though the film’s political aspects and the stuff with Rica may provide meat for the theory-hounds, it is the high octane trucking stuff that will live longest in the memory of most viewers, with the gear-churning night-drives across winding mountain roads, the sweaty, fast-talking chaos of the market and the images of spilled apples cascading down placid hillsides all majestically portrayed.

Though anyone who comes to ‘Thieves’ Highway’ anticipating black hats, gats and femme fatales will be soundly disappointed, it nonetheless stands as both a uniquely raw and audacious film to have emerged from this particular time & place, and as a quintessential example of the kind of masculine, working class story that has pretty much entirely disappeared from cinema as demographics have shifted through the decades.

How often, these days, do you see commercial movies in which the precise method of repairing a drive shaft on an army surplus truck, or the per-box wholesale rate on golden delicious apples, are the key narrative issues upon which our heroes fates hang? As one of ‘Thieves Highway’ biggest action set-pieces unfolded, involving Nick being rescued by his driving partner after being nearly suffocated by roadside sand when his jack collapses mid-way through changing a wheel, I couldn’t help but reflect that you just don’t see this stuff on-screen any more. From such obvious companion pieces as Clouzot’s ‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953) to grimly proletarian post-war thrillers like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962) and the aforementioned ‘Hell Drivers’, it is a spirit of dour, engine oil-encrusted male enterprise that hasn’t so much disappeared from the world itself as it has simply disappeared from our culture.

It is interesting to reflect that the market conditions dramatised here probably remain largely unchanged to this day – in fact their impact has probably only been magnified by the advent of bigger, better transport networks and the march of economic globalisation – yet to all intents and purposes, they have simply become invisible to us. The fact is, the people involved with this level of industry simply don’t go to the movies anymore, and even if they did, chances are they wouldn’t care to see their own workaday struggles staring back at them.

Meanwhile, those of us who do have the time and money to invest in an increasingly privileged popular culture probably can't much relate to the life represented by some lowly grease-monkey wrestling with a hand-crank at the side of the road (or his nearest 21st century equivalent), just as we prefer not to spend too much time thinking about where our apples come from. Chances are, they’re still spilling down hillsides and rotting in the sun en route to our preferred ethically rebranded supermarkets, but on a scale Dassin and Bezzerides could scarcely have imagined, as the cameras look elsewhere.