Alex da Silva Richard Conte (Nick) returns home after serving with the military and he brings gifts from all over the world for his mother, father and girlfriend. They don't go down well, though. His father Morris Carnovsky (Yanko) has lost both his legs in a trucking accident and has no need for a pair of Chinese slippers. Conte sets out for revenge for those responsible for his father's condition. It involves teaming up with trucker Millard Mitchell (Ed) and selling apples to market trader and bully boy Lee J Cobb (Mike).I was a bit wary of this film when it started. A film about trucks. Not my thing. However, this is more than just a film about trucks. But it is unbelievable in parts and the main examples of this come with Conte's encounters with gangster Lee J. I'm afraid Conte would have been disposed of pretty sharpish and there is no way he would have got away with such an antagonistic manner towards the king of the thugs. Even in the final climax, Lee J is seen as a cowering wreck when face-to-face with Conte. It doesn't make sense.My favourite in the cast are street girl Valentina Cortesa (Rica) and fellow trucker Jack Oakie (Slob). They both deliver funny lines and give the most notable performances. They win the acting honours for me. I usually find Oakie an irritant and groan if I see him on any cast list. However, he has won me around with this performance. His character has a conscience - sort of!

poe426 THIEVES' HIGHWAY is one of the earliest road movies and, no two ways about it, one of the best. Jules Dassin surprises again with his own unique way of approaching a scene (the opening scene between Conte and his father, for example, or the scene where Conte lies pinned beneath his rig). Like WAGES OF FEAR, THIEVES' HIGHWAY never veers too far off course and we're along for the ride, riding shotgun- the best place to be in a road movie. Lee J. Cobb is on hand, warming up for his role in ON THE WATERFRONT, and my favorite scene in THIEVES' HIGHWAY is the barroom brawl, wherein Conte hammers Cobb senseless beneath a framed picture of Heavyweight Champion Bob Fitzsimmons. (Having earned a very meager living as a cab driver, I can relate to Conte's character's plight: when I collapsed in a service station parking lot one night- from a medical condition I didn't know I had, called "occult blood"- I had a guy try to pick my pocket quite literally while I was flat on my face. I stopped him by grabbing his wrist. He released my roll of bills- mostly ones- and kicked me in the head. There's ALWAYS somebody waiting to take advantage of a man when he's down...) (Prior to that, I'd written a three-day novel titled HACKS about cab-driving that could've served as the basis for a low budget independent feature itself.)

chaos-rampant This is rich and wonderful, one of the most atmospheric noir. With it, Dassin takes his place next to Welles as a master of that form. Whereas Welles emphasized the fictional embroidery being woven with stories inside stories, Dassin commits himself to a single dynamic brushstroke of life. Welles fused a narrating eye into the places it dictates, Dassin fuses place (which he essayed in Naked city) with character, masterfully so.The idea is that a man has come back from the sea to the waking world of strife and deceit, a sailor. He's a stand-up guy who wants to do what's good, right wrongs. All through the film, he is a voice for reason and justice. He is Greek, perhaps to emphasize this struggle for order and light mixed with proud violence that defines the Greek experience through time. We could make the case that the Odyssey is an early noir text, all about a schmuck tossed by amused gods in seas of cosmic mishap.Our guy has come back to this noir world of mishap and machinations. The entire film is that ironic laughter of the gods that snuffs the light. Everywhere he goes some seemingly divine joke is already at play, anticipating him; seeking him as the victim of fate. Right from the first scene where the frolicking of his return is suddenly silenced by the revelation of his father's accident; notice too the ritual mask he's brought back and scares his girlfriend with it, foreshadowing deceit and ritual games.Something has masked itself from him, from his point of view, to the world of accident and human evil. Trucks are always about to give out. Flat tires obstruct him. The truck collapses on him crushing his neck. The whole world is conspiring against him, a definitive attribute of noir but seldom done with such clarity and penetrating force. Exhausted by the long journey, he's always on the verge of sleep. He passes out half a dozen times, entries to the hallucinative night where some other machine cranks out the world.In San Francisco, he has his tire slashed, a prostitute seduces him out of the street so the insidious fruit peddler can sell off his valuable cargo of apples. In the fruit market, everyone is trying to strike bargains, to outwit the other as if to snuff him from existence. His trucker partner who is the one hope of light in all this is continuously obstructed on the road. His money, won with so much bravado, is stolen in a minute. Worst of all; he has no way of knowing that the prostitute that he's grown fond of wasn't in on the theft. He has to go on faith alone. The film should have made a big deal of this, a question of faith as what sets the world back on its orbit.In the end we have clean resolutions. In a more abstract rendition, we'd never know just who stole his money, remember moments earlier he was yelling it on the phone in a roomful of drunk strangers. We'd never truly know if she was in on it, having to go on faith ourselves.Either way, this is masterful stuff folks, up there with Out of the Past and Lady from Shanghai in the ecstatic thrust of self.Noir Meter: 4/4

bkoganbing Jules Dassin's last American production would be this adaption of A.I. Bezzerides novel about the slimy dealings in the wholesale produce market. After Thieves Highway, Dassin would do Night And The City in London and then be subject to the blacklist. As it is Thieves Highway is a remarkable film with a couple of interesting subplots.Returning home from the war Richard Conte finds his father Morris Carnovsky crippled, the result of a trucking accident and robbed of the money for recently delivered produce to Lee J. Cobb the man in charge of San Francisco's wholesale market. Conte decides to take some vengeance out and get the money his father was robbed of. In order to do this Conte goes into partnership with Millard Mitchell an old time trucker who now has Carnovsky's truck which has seen better days. When Conte arrives with a delivery of needed apples for the market, Cobb pays him off all right, but gives him the same kind of treatment he gave dad. A little something extra with femme fatal Valentina Cortese.The main plot involves Conte and Cobb, but woven into the story is that of Conte's engagement to Barbara Lawrence which takes a jolt when she meets Cortese. Also Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney play a pair of scavenger drivers who follow Mitchell in his beat up truck waiting for something to befall him.Trucking wholesale fruit and vegetables is shown to be a dog eat dog business and top dog is Lee J. Cobb. His part here is almost a dress rehearsal for the waterfront racketeer he played in On The Waterfront. In a cast of good performances Cobb is also top dog.Thieves Highway is a wonderful film that dates not one bit because things you see here still go on.