SeeQuant
Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction
pointyfilippa
The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.
Isbel
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
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!
tomgillespie2002
Thieves' Highway was the penultimate American film director Jules Dassin made before finding himself banished from Hollywood and placed on the infamous Blacklist. Informed in 1948 of his fate but handed enough time to squeeze out Night and the City (1950) for Fox, Dassin was just one of many cinema giants cut down in their prime (although he would go on to make the masterpiece Rififi in France in 1955), and the bruising film noirs he made during this period were some of the finest the genre has ever seen. Thieves' Highway's world of the produce market may not seen the ideal setting for American's own brand of stylish brooding, but this is one of the toughest and darkest noirs out there.Nico 'Nick' Garcos (Richard Conte) returns home from the war to find his father crippled after a road accident which resulted in the loss of his legs. After demanding the truth, Nick learns that the crash occurred after his father made a deal with unscrupulous market dealer Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb) and was run off the road. Seeking vengeance, Nick first of all demands back the truck his father sold to Ed Kinney (Millard Mitchell), but instead ends up going into business with him on a load of in-demand Golden Delicious apples. Following a 36-hour truck drive, Nick arrives in San Francisco and almost immediately find himself at odds with Figlia. Exhausted, Nick is cared for by good-heated prostitute Rica (Valentina Cortese) while Figlia shrewdly plunders his stock.Cortese's performance is the beating heart of the movie. A well- rounded, decent person at odds with the shifty-eyed criminals that pepper the marketplace, she is magnificent in the role, a shining light in the midst of an entourage of shady characters. This includes Conte's lead, who while eager to do the right thing at first, soon sees terrible, naive decisions force him into desperate measures. The produce market, with its battered, growling trucks and beaten-down drivers, provides a perfect noir setting. You can hear the cogs of capitalism and industry grind as the underpaid blue- collared types risk life and limb for the chance of a payday. It's littered with the same sense of pessimism and cynicism that made Dassin's Brute Force (1947) such a powerful movie, and will leave you feel somewhat beaten down by the time it's over. American noir at its toughest.
Lechuguilla
Nick (Richard Conte), a young WWII veteran returning to his roots in California, seeks revenge against Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a greedy, cigar-chomping produce buyer in San Francisco who injured Nick's working-class father, a trucker who can no longer haul apples from California orchards to market.The plot follows Nick as he sets out on his revenge mission. In typical noir fashion, it's a hostile universe Nick enters, as he teams up with another wildcat trucker in an uneasy alliance. He must deal with highway fatigue, mechanical problems, thugs, and manipulative people along the way. Money is the symbol of evil that underlies the story, and Nick's narrative journey highlights the peril of trusting others.The film's structure starts out familial and normal, but transitions to a dark, menacing world of oncoming headlights, a produce market with its noise and clutter, wet brick streets at night, and cheap, seedy interiors. With strong side lighting, and a maze of light and shadow, combined with high, wide-angle camera shots and explicit framing, the B&W cinematography conveys a sinister, uninviting world typical of the noir genre. There's also a distortion of time, as Nick's not-so-excellent adventure in San Francisco unfolds through one seemingly endless night.Richard Conte gives a really fine performance, as does Lee J. Cobb, and Valentina Cortese, who plays the femme fatale whom Nick meets at Figlia's market. My only major complaint is the inclusion of several truckers other than Nick, which muddles the story a tad.Mostly, "Thieves' Highway" paints a grim picture of life among blue-collar workers during the 1940s, trying to make a buck amid harsh conditions and greedy, manipulative scoundrels. Thematically proletariat, it's comparable to the work of writers such as John Steinbeck and films like "The Grapes of Wrath". The film offers genuine drama, tension, excellent acting, and good noir visuals.
ackstasis
Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) returns from a round-the-world engagement to a home that, at first glance, typifies the ideal American household. His father's working-class singing voice booms across the backyard; his mother fussily busies herself with the daily chores; his girlfriend Polly (Barbara Lawrence) bursts jubilantly into the room, embracing him in a passionate, sensuous kiss. But looks can be deceiving: a well-intended gift of Chinese slippers betrays a recent family tragedy; Polly's disappointed response to another gift hints at a fractured romance, a relationship borne not from love but the love of money. The family's facade of happiness is exposed as a sham, and it's the peeling back of this superficial skin with which Jules Dassin's 'Thieves' Highway (1949)' is concerned. A seemingly-innocuous industry, that of fresh fruit cartage and wholesale, is shown to wallow in depravity, thuggery and callous opportunism. In this way, the film might be considered a companion piece to the director's previous effort, 'The Naked City (1948),' which similarly exposed gruelling drama within the confines of the audiences' daily lives.Richard Conte was one of the most interesting leading men of his era. His big-shot crime boss in 'The Big Combo (1955)' might be the decade's most charismatic villain, but he could also play the resolute hero, as in Preminger's 'Whirlpool (1949).' To 'Thieves' Highway' he brings a cocky self-assurance, the sort of fearless conviction that's bound to blow up in one's face eventually. Lee J. Cobb's conniving fruit wholesaler, Mike Figlia, is a small-time crook, but one who invokes the viewer's contempt through his ruthlessly-capitalist exploitation of the humble working-class American. Only the females aren't as memorably drawn: Barbara Lawrence's Polly is rather abruptly discarded as a self-seeking gold-digger, as though only to allow for a romance with possible prostitute Rica (Valentina Cortesa), who grows a heart of gold. 'Thieves' Highway' no doubt inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's nail-biting 'The Wages of Fear (1953),' another classic tale of trucking peril, but unfortunately it itself lacks the French director's gritty cynicism, or at least a degree of pessimism as absolute as Clouzot's.This slackening of tone is seen most tellingly in the film's dramatic climax, a confrontation between Garcos and Figlia. The sequence doesn't work because it's conflicted between two opposing moral viewpoints. In one sense, Dassin appears to advocate Garcos' vigilante action in subjecting Figlia to a physical beating, since he successfully reclaims his stolen payments and achieves some degree of mental closure regarding his father's crippling. However, at this moment, as Garcos collapses onto the bench in exhaustion, policemen enter the diner and arrest Figlia for his crimes – but not before one officer sternly wags his finger at Garcos for taking the law into his own hands. To have an excellent film intruded upon by such an awkward, juvenile moral lesson is bad enough, but the film could have gotten across the same message in a more powerful manner. As the police stormed into the diner, my blood had suddenly run cold with the chilling thought: what if Figlia is dead? Out of pure bloody-minded pride, a good man would have been condemned for life, the ultimate testament that vigilantism is not the answer.
