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.

Sitting Target (Douglas Hickox, 1972)

The pantheon of great ‘70s British crime films is, I suppose, I fairly limited one. Whereas Italy, France and Japan were cranking them out with a vengeance, codifying and exploiting every corner of their nations’ rich underworld mythologies, the UK never managed to get a comparable production line rolling, despite having all the requisite ingredients (a readymade hard-boiled aesthetic, an intimidating legacy of real-life hoods, enough industrial wasteland to host a million blood-thirsty showdowns) very much in place. With a film industry increasingly deprived of vital US funding and increasingly snooty in its approach to genre cinema, British crime cinema entered the dread wasteland of the ‘80s clutching a mere handful of carefully guarded classics alongside a scattering of misbegotten duds and money-sink bad ideas, and that’s yr lot really.

As such, good examples of the Brit-crime aesthetic are highly prized, which leads me to rejoice even more in my belated discovery of what turns out to be one of the best of the bunch – Douglas Hickox’ ‘Sitting Target’. Once again, I must here thank the proprietors of London’s Filmbar70 for bringing this one to my attention, their uncanny knack for screening incredible movies that had somehow slipped beneath my radar once again delivering the goods.

Not that I needed much encouragement to step out for a screening of ‘Sitting Target’. I mean – action-packed crime/revenge story? Oliver Reed? South London? 1972? Count me IN! Shooters! Car chases! Coppers in Morris Minors (possibly)! Edward Woodward (definitely)! This is gonna be amazing.

But you know that feeling when you approach a relatively little-known film and think, “well theoretically this sounds great, but I’d better keep my expectations low, because if it actually WAS that great, surely it would be hugely popular and acclaimed; given its continued obscurity, I suppose it will most likely be a missed opportunity or ill-starred fiasco of some kind”? Yes, I’m sure you know that feeling, even if your gut instincts don’t regularly include suffixes and semi-colons. And correspondingly, you’ll probably also be familiar the  sense of surprise and elation that follows when you watch a film like ‘Sitting Target’ said discover that yes, it actually IS as good as it sounds - perhaps even landing a dent or two on the rear bumper of ‘Get Carter’ in the great Brit-crime grind up the M4.

Ok, well, maybe not quite. I guess the plotting here is fairly contrived, the characters are pretty shallow (only really distinguished by the oomph the first-rate cast puts into them), and there are some goofy ‘action movie’ moments in the second half that come across as kinda silly, undercutting the prevailing mood of quasi-realism. But on first viewing such things don’t matter much, and on the whole I was verily blown away by just how solidly *good* ‘Sitting Target’ is. In the limited field of British crime, it’s one of the heavy-hitters for sure, going off with the kind of unpretentious, populist bang that’s rarely encountered in the staid world of mainstream British cinema (rated X solely due to its blood-curdling thuggery!), and basically providing one hell of a good time for anyone with a yen for tough crime flicks in general, and the murky underbelly of ‘70s Britain in particular.

Not that the film’s quality should come as that much of a surprise I suppose. Director Hickox came to ‘Sitting Target’ following a divisive adaptation of Joe Orton’s ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’, and went straight on to make the much-loved ‘Theatre of Blood’, taking the unpromising (from a mainstream POV at least) shell of a retirement-era Vincent Price bodycount flick and transforming it into one of the most perennially popular British-made horror movies of all time.* In their own way, both of these projects – precariously balanced between outrage and respectability – suggest that Hickox was perfectly placed to go to town on a smart, violent crime movie… and a hefty bank-roll from MGM probably didn’t hurt matters either.

Whilst I’ve never actually bothered to research the issue in any detail, my understanding is that it was in around ’72 or ’73 that the American studios started to pull the rug out from under their UK-based operations, thus precipitating the eternal crisis that has dogged the national film industry ever since. But assuming this was the case, you certainly wouldn’t know it from looking at Douglas Hickox’ CV. Both ‘..Target’ and ‘Theatre..’ were backed by MGM and for whatever reason, the director seems to have thrived on such productions, apparently pleasing the studio to the extent that he managed to spend the rest of the decade working on such high profile US/UK crossovers as the bizarre, John Wayne-starring Brit-crime caper ‘Brannigan’ (1975) and 1979’s belated sequel ‘Zulu Dawn’.

Anyway, point is, whilst ‘Sitting Target’ is not exactly lavishly budgeted by Hollywood standards, it clearly had more cash to throw around than your average British b-movie, and the bulk of it seems to have been invested wisely – in production design, technical expertise, casting, stunt-work, music… stuff that really matters, in other words.

Most importantly, ‘..Target’ plays like a film in which the cast and crew had the time to get things right - a rare virtue in genre cinema. Just like the sort of heist the characters presumably wish they could pull off, nearly every shot here seems flawlessly planned and executed. The cinematography (courtesy of Edward Scaife, whose career as DP ranges from ‘Night of the Demon’ to ‘The Dirty Dozen’) is plain superb, making somewhat experimental use of reflections on glass, super-impositions, deep focus and so forth, with some really effective night shooting too. The editing is tight as a story like this requires, and Hickox’s direction, though rarely ostentatious, oozes style, precisely the way a post-Point Blank/Get Carter crime movie should.

For my money, the film’s opening half hour – filmed largely in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, subbing for a non-specific English prison – is practically faultless, launching straight into what looks to be a brutal, existential crime yarn in the tradition of Jim Thompson or Jean-Pierre Melville. And what better vehicle for your brutal, existential needs than Oliver Reed, here looking more embittered and punch-drunk than ever, expressing more pent-up rage in a single flared nostril than most actors manage in a lifetime?

In fact we’ve barely even been introduced to jailbird Harry Lomart before he see him subjected to a harrowing spell in solitary confinement following a homicidal assault on his wife (Jill St. John). When she pops in at visiting hour to reluctantly inform Harry that she is seeing another man and wants a divorce, Lomart literally punches straight through the plastic communication grille, foaming at the mouth as he throttles her – an astonishing moment of violence that only an actor like Reed could render believably. Indeed, Lomart turns out to be such a perfect role for Reed that I can only assume the character was written as such, balancing a mixture of brooding, taciturn nihilism and relentless single-mindedness with outbursts of unhinged, hulk-like aggression, and just a hint of blubbing sentimentality behind the machismo… aside from the fact he has to adopt an East End accent in place of his usual husky RP tones (“I’m gonna get that toffee-nosed git one day..”), fans can be assured that this is full-force Reed, exactly the way we like it.

Hickox wastes little time in establishing the bind Lomart is in, setting out his inner turmoil and limited range of action with admirable cinematic efficiency, whilst Stanley Myers’ so-fucking-bad-ass-I-can-scarcely-believe-it psychotronic score adds tension-building pulse to proceedings**, as we head straight into a tour de force prison break sequence that is vicious and suspenseful enough to actually seem kinda convincing. Lomart and his best mate Birdy (Ian McShane) team up with a snooty Firm big-wig to make their escape (an excellent turn from the rarely-less-than-excellent Freddie Jones) , scaling walls, paying off and/or bludgeoning night-guards and beating a guard dog to death with a brick, culminating in a nail-biting bit of chasm-crossing grappling hook business that sees Reed swinging Tarzan-style toward the outer wall with seconds to spare (I really hope he did his own stunts).

At the risk of repeating myself, all of this is tautly directed, brilliantly performed, and by the time Ollie, Freddie and Lovejoy have made their getaway, swigging from a bottle of scotch in the back of a counterfeit US Army truck as it roars off into the night, I’m finding it hard to believe that a film this good can actually exist without tearing a black hole in the delicate fabric of British cinema.

Sadly, the remainder of ‘Sitting Target’ perhaps doesn’t *quite* live up to the promise of the opening prison segment. Somehow it feels as if the freedom of movement offered by the outside world invites the movie to take on some slack, loosen its belt a few notches. But even as the brooding Melville-ism is overtaken by a more commercially minded, action-packed approach to the genre, there’s still an absolute shit ton of stuff left to enjoy here, often enlivened by the same spirit of devil-may-care mayhem and street-level psychopathy that fuelled the contemporaneous Italian crime boom.

Once Birdy and Lomart hit London (the latter packing a high-end shooter and fixated on dead wife-shaped vengeance), some of the action set-pieces that transpire are simply ridiculous, but well-chosen locations, keen attention to detail and pure cinematic flash all do their bit to stop things ever going completely off the rails. For instance, a scene in which Reed scurries through a maze of washing lines at the base of a Clapham tower-block dodging a pair of motorcycle cops seems absolutely absurd on a practical level, but as a bravura cinematic sequence is works brilliantly, with disorientating montage editing and bright patterns of gauzy colour, accompanied by Myers’ churning collage of police radio, sirens and malfunctioning synth bleeps – a great example of low(ish) budget cinema’s power to take a pretty laughable concept and render it extraordinary.

It’s a particular treat to see the familiarly drab environs of just-over-the-river South-West London transformed into a viable backdrop for shoot-outs, double-crosses and pyrotechnics, as the sodden, concrete landscapes of Clapham Junction and Battersea begin to play an increasingly prominent role in proceedings. Using chaotic, vertiginous angles and jagged, asymmetrical lines, Hickox fills this overlooked corner of London with noir-ish signifiers of confinement and confusion, adapting them for a new era and a new city, as tower blocks, construction sites, snaking rail lines and the crumbling remnants of Victoriana combine to reflect Lomart’s tormented headspace; brutalist design meets brutalist behaviour, if you will.

In British films from the ‘50s and ‘60s, Battersea often seems to feature as a place where deviant toffs and shady characters from across the river in Chelsea keep their quiet little love-nests***, and indeed we see that tradition followed up in another great segment here, as Harry & Birdy crash a spectacularly garish/grotty swank-pad where a former underworld acquaintance (Frank Finley) is housing his current mistress (Jill Townsend). Although he’s not allotted much screen-time, Finley’s portrayal of crooked race-track mogul Marty Gold is one of my favourite things in the whole movie (“Christ, don’t you do nothing but wash your bastard self?” he yells up the stairs as he hears the bath running), and Townsend is very good too (probably the film’s strongest female presence, not that that’s saying much). The whole sequence oozes a wonderful, peculiarly British bad taste, from the pink bathtub and matching telephone to endless supplies of cheap scotch, ceiling mirrors, a sudden mania for elaborate mirror / reflection shots, and what appears to be a giant brandy glass full of goldfish in the living room… heavy Pete Walker vibes predominate, which is fine by me.

Like a thousand other 70s crime flicks, ‘Sitting Target’s conclusion decamps to a junk-strewn, disused railyard (directly opposite Battersea Power Station, if the editing is to be believed), matching up the splintered allegiances and collapsing plans of the story with a visual palette of twisted metal, shattered glass and rust-covered girders that’s pretty much obligatory for this kind of movie, but is captured with particular verve here. In an inspired move, Reed gets to screech around is some kind of bright red, soft-topped land-rover / dune buggy type thing – perhaps the perfect vehicular equivalent of the actor himself (assuming you discount the possibility of a pirate-hijacked Victorian dreadnaught) - and much fire, bloodshed and heavily sign-posted bathos ensues, leading us through a wholly satisfactory stock conclusion.

Overall, I think ‘Sitting Target’ is one of those films that works best as a purely visceral experience. As soon as you subject it to closer examination, significant flaws start piling up left & right. For one thing, former Bond girl and American interest Jill St John really doesn’t cut it as Lomart’s missus. Set adrift in a film in which the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, her nervy, exaggerated mannerisms and wobbly trans-atlantic accent (like Reed’s cockney, it comes and goes) fail to ever quite convince, and the expository dialogue she feeds police detective Edward Woodward in their scene together feels clunky as hell.

Speaking of which, what the hell happened to Woodward’s character anyway? He has one big scene, introduced as if he’s going to be a significant player in the forthcoming drama, but then he disappears completely, only turning up again in the film’s final moments to glower through the flames. I get the feeling much of his screen-time might have ended up on the cutting room floor, and actually the film betrays numerous other symptoms of regrettable script-chopping shenanigans, reducing the story to a set of bare bones that perhaps stick out just a bit too clearly at times (particularly given that many of the best moments result from its assorted detours and local colour). Whilst I personally didn’t guess the finale’s Big Twist on first viewing, I’m sure that if I’d paused for five minutes midway through to examine the several gaping holes in the information the script had provided us with, the ‘shocking’ turn-around would have been rendered pretty bloody obvious – a conclusion more analytical viewers than I will likely reach without the aid of a ‘thinking break’.

But - this kinda stuff doesn’t really matter. It won’t even register on first viewing, what with all the great stuff that’s also being thrown at the screen. Even if it doesn’t quite manage to connect on quite the kind of gut-punch emotional level I demand of real top drawer crime films, this one is easily still, uh, top of the second drawer down, if you get me? A high-energy ninety minute rampage through the streets of Ted Heath’s England, full of flash cinematic business, powerhouse acting and unfeasible mad dog violence, it’s a real thrill to see a British tough-‘70s-crime contender that can step in the ring alongside ‘Gang War in Milan’ or ‘Yakuza Graveyard’, and here’s hoping there’s plenty more of the same out there somewhere awaiting my attention.

Bloody cinema, you bastards!

* Interestingly, ‘Sitting Target’ also shares several shooting locations with ‘Theatre of Blood’. One beautifully shot but entirely pointless scene has Reed wandering across the stage at the derelict Putney Hippodrome (site of many of Price’s depredations in ‘..Theatre’), and if I’m not mistaken, the final showdowns of both films take place in the same SW London railyard / car park type place.

**Sitting Target’s OST was reissued by Finders Keepers in 2007. Now out of print, but worth every penny if you can find a copy.

***Well, I’ve seen several films in which this was the case anyway. I don’t know whether it was a frequent enough feature of the era’s cinema to constitute a ‘thing’, but I’d like to think so.