Spikeopath Highway Dragnet is directed by Nathan Juran and written by Herb Meadow, U.S.Anderson, Roger Corman and Jerome Odlum. It stars Richard Conte, Joan Bennett, Wanda Hendrix and Reed Hadley. Music is by Edward J. Kay and cinematography by John J. Martin.All I did was buy her a drink. One drink, and for 65 cents I bought a martini mixed with dynamite!Though indexed in some sources as film noir, this barely resonates as such. It is basically a man on the lam picture, where Conte is wrongly accused of murder and has to go on the run to escape police arrest. He hitches with two gals, who start to become wary of their newly acquired companion. So, we have cops trying to capture their target, with near misses and with Reed "The Voice" Hadley heading up the dragnet operation, whilst there's the mystery element of who is the killer hanging in the air. Cast are fine and the production is standard fare, the finale at least serves up an atmospheric locale, and there's some decent snatches of dialogue. But really it's average at best and not one to seek out as a matter of urgency. 5/10

Robert J. Maxwell I enjoyed this piece of what my current neighbors would call basura. I mean, it's done by the numbers. It's utterly stupid but exquisitely so.Richard Conte is Jim Henry, just released from the USMC, decorated several times, so we know he's a good guy. He stops for a drink in a Las Vegas bar while hitch-hiking to meet a friend in California. He politely offers to buy a drunk for a frowzy blond sitting on the next stool. She initiates a fracas. The next morning she's found strangled with a strap. The police pin it on Conte and the papers dub him "The Strap Killer." Later, Conte muses, "Sure, I bought her a martini. Sixty-five cents worth of dynamite." (That's the closest we get to poetry.) But Conte escapes, and is reluctantly given a ride through the desert by two women, the professional photographer Joan Bennett and her model, young Wanda Hendrix. The women soon find out who Conte is supposed to be. The viewer with insight or experience will figure out the real murderer at about the half-way point.The police spread a dragnet across points on the highway but Conte eludes them one way or another. You should see him smash through wooden barriers and demolish a couple of parked motorcycles. This is one tough swinging Jim.Acting. Nobody wins the silver star here. Conte snaps out his lines in a brusque and commanding tone. His style, which hardly ever varied, doesn't clash with the character though. Joan Bennett, who was fine elsewhere, is here given a role that turns her into an irritating nuisance. Her New York accent sounds thoroughly specious and swank, with Albian overtones. "After" becomes "Ah-fter." Wanda Hendrix can't act.The story is a kind of mechanical armature around which these three characters (four, if you count the sonorous Reed Hadley, the earnest cop) are molded. It's as if a couple of experienced writers of B features sat down and said, "Let's have the hero trying to escape from the police on a desert highway. How many different narrow escapes can we think of?" They did a good job. The close calls are uncountable. Somebody may look at Conte suspiciously and say, "Hey, didn't I just see your picture in the --", and the phone rings. Or the director cross cuts between police cars with their sirens ululating and Conte frantically trying to get gas at a station in the middle of nowhere. Only the owner is a lazy Mexican who has an old gas pump that is hand operated, and he ever-so-slowly pushes the handle back and forth while chatting amiably about how he and the ancient gas pump are "friends." It's all absurd and fun. Best thing about the movie is the location shooting, which nicely evokes the Mojave desert and, later, the climax at the Salton Sea. Maybe others might not like it as much as I do. It redintegrates memories of being a teen and being cooped up on a Coast Guard cutter that circled for weeks in mid-Pacific. Once in a while, an old movie would be shown at night, and this was one of them. We wept with joy. And Wanda Hendrix, actress or not, looked pretty good.

MartinHafer "Highway Dragnet" is a frustrating film. The actors do a pretty good job and the look of the film is quite nice. It's too bad, then, that the writing was so lousy. In fact, the film is filled with so many logical holes that it resembles cheese! Richard Conte plays a Korean War vet who has just returned home. He's decided to visit Las Vegas and ends up getting into a ton of trouble. That's because after having a loud altercation with a dame in a bar, she ends up dead and all the facts seem to point towards him. So what does he do? Yup, crime film cliché #5--he slugs the cops and disappears!! And, when he hitches a ride out of town, surprise of surprises, one of the ladies driving this car eventually ends up being the real murderer!!! What are the odds?! And, to make it worse, at the end of the film, this murderous woman shoots a detective at point blank range with a .45--and the guy is only SLIGHTLY wounded!!! He SHOULD have had a hole in him large enough to drive through, but miraculously he survives AND hears her make a confession to the original murder!!!! How convenient! Can any of this really happen in the real world? No way! But in this bizarre film, time and again, the impossible seems to occur--making it a very sloppily written movie. It's a shame, as Conte did a good job and he was a fine actor who was simply better than the material they gave him. You can do better than this with your viewing time.

sobaok This film is a real treat to watch due to the many absurdities that abound from scene to scene. After a shouting match in a barroom with a buxom over-the-hill blonde ex-model, Richard Conte, finds himself hitch- hiking to the Salton Sea where his house is rapidly disappearing from the rising shoreline! He's picked up by the police, who claim he murdered aforementioned blonde bombshell. Before you can blink an eye Conte's outta there and shooting holes in a classic Kaiser patrol car. He escapes in an old Nash which he abandons upon seeing Joan Bennett(wearing a dress made out of a parachute) and Wanda Hendrix trying to fix a broken-down sedan. He fixes things up while Joan's pooch becomes roadkill. Any 10 year-old has figured out the films outcome at this point. Conte becomes "Mr. Leash", the crazed killer, who gets a whole resort full of vacationers running for their lives. Conte, Joan and Wanda do everything but roast marshmellows over a desert campfire before Joan teaches them both how to do the "Twist" in an improbable puddle of quicksand near Conte's rapidly decaying, drowning dreamhome in the Salton Sea. This movie has a lot of unintentional laughs in it. A great bad movie.