Thieves' Highway

Jules Dassin
1949

Jules Dassin's forced blacklist exile to Europe is historically one of Hollywood's greatest losses. At the peak of his skills Dassin was in the midst of building an uncompromising (or at least minimally compromised) body of work that boldly exposed the darker aspects of the American experience. I'm not sure if "Thieves' Highway," the director's last American effort, is my favorite of Dassin's films, but it's been quite a while since I've been this impressed with a picture. Nick Garcos (note the first generation immigrant name) comes home from the navy to find his poor trucker father has been crossed and mutilated by a crooked fruit dealer (Lee J. Cobb) in San Francisco. Partly motivated by Revenge, partly by greed, Nick heads North with a truckload of the season's first Golden Delicious apple crop. Just like his father he's hustled out of his money by Mike Figlia, but won't go home without a fight. The rickety tubs Nick and his partner push up hills and careen through valleys create more tension than the explosion prone lorries of "The Wages of Fear" (1953), and with plenty of severe night photography and overlaid images Dassin perfectly creates foreboding noir atmosphere. By bringing high drama and edginess to the infrastructural elements most of us take for granted, he also cleverly injects social responsibility into a picture that could easily have the romantic gloss of a traditional gangster film. Finally, the most brilliantly subversive move in the picture, is the conclusion of Nick choosing the blue collar life and an earthy hooker for his bride instead of plastic suburbia with a gold-digging trophy wife.