Thieves' Highway: Dassin's Trucking Noir

Most film noir is about money in the abstract — a briefcase, an insurance policy, a number that changes hands in a dark room. Thieves’ Highway is about the price of apples, and it is one of the few American films of the period that understands the difference. Nick Garcos does not want a fortune. He wants what his load is worth on the morning it reaches the market, and the entire tragedy of the picture is that the load is only worth something for about six hours, and the road to San Francisco is longer than that.

Jules Dassin made it for 20th Century Fox in 1949, the last film he would complete in America before the blacklist put him on a boat. It is a crime film in which nobody robs a bank. The crime is a produce commission agent underpaying a driver, and Dassin films that transaction with the ferocity most directors reserve for a shootout, because he understood something the genre usually flinches from: for working men, the theft that ruins a life is legal.

Bezzerides writes his father

A. I. Bezzerides adapted his own novel Thieves’ Market and the material is autobiographical in the least decorative sense. His family were immigrants; his father hauled produce out of the San Joaquin Valley; Bezzerides had driven the runs himself. He wrote the way people who have done a job write about it — the film is thick with the specific knowledge of load weights, market opening times, commission structures and the arithmetic of a tyre.

That knowledge is why the film’s suspense works. When Nick and his partner Ed Kinney load two trucks with Golden Delicious apples in Fresno and set off for the Embarcadero, the tension has nothing to do with anyone’s intentions. It comes from a brake that is not right, a tyre that is not new, and a market that will pay less at ten than it would have at six. The film’s most agonising sequences are mechanical failures. A wheel comes off. A load shifts. A man lies under a jack on a highway shoulder at night, and Dassin holds it, and you find yourself doing sums.

Bezzerides is the great unclaimed author of the late cycle. He gave Nicholas Ray the exhausted policeman of On Dangerous Ground, and six years after this he would hand Robert Aldrich the script that ends the classic era in a nuclear flash in Kiss Me Deadly. His signature is bodies as equipment. His characters are always tired, always calculating whether they can make it, and always aware that the answer depends on machinery they cannot afford to maintain.

Why it works: the market as a set

Norbert Brodine shot the film on the actual produce markets of San Francisco and in the orchards of the valley, and the location work is doing structural labour rather than adding flavour. The market at four in the morning — lorries reversing, crates coming down, agents walking the line calling prices — is an environment with its own rules, and Dassin refuses to explain them. You learn the market the way Nick does, by being cheated in it.

The film’s key craft decision is that the villain is introduced as a customer. Mike Figlia, played by Lee J. Cobb with a bulk and bonhomie that curdles across the picture, does not menace Nick. He buys from him. He offers a price, then improves it, then advances a little cash, then finds a reason the cash was not quite what was agreed, and each move is delivered with the warmth of a man doing a favour. Cobb’s performance is a study in the aggression available to whoever controls the buying, and he barely raises his voice until the film is nearly over. The one moment of physical violence he commissions arrives almost as an administrative correction.

Richard Conte plays Nick as a man whose competence is his weakness. He is a good driver, a good mechanic, a good negotiator, and every one of those virtues keeps him at the table longer than he should stay. Conte had a rare quality among noir leads — genuine physical credibility as a working man — and the film uses it. He is never smarter than the room. He is simply more determined, and determination against a commission agent with a warehouse and a police contact is a rate of exchange with only one outcome.

Valentina Cortese arrives as Rica, hired by Figlia to distract Nick and keep him out of the market during the hours his fruit is losing value. That is the film’s most elegant piece of construction: the femme fatale is a subcontractor. Cortese plays her with a weariness that has nothing romantic in it, and the film lets her switch sides through plain recognition — she is being paid a small fee to help a large man rob a small one, and she has been on the receiving end of the same transaction her whole life.

The other truck

Ed Kinney is the film’s warning and its conscience. Millard Mitchell plays him as a driver who has been doing this too long, in a truck that is older than Nick’s, hauling the same apples down the same road with a much thinner margin for error. Everything in Kinney’s story is a preview of everything in Nick’s. Dassin runs the two trucks in parallel and lets the audience work out the arithmetic, which is the film’s best structural idea: two men, same load, same destination, different equipment, and the equipment is fate.

There is a plot engine underneath all this. Nick’s father Yanko was a produce hauler too, and he is now a man without legs, and the crash that took them was not an accident of the road. Figlia is the reason. So Nick’s run to San Francisco has a second purpose, and the film is honest enough to notice that his revenge and his business are the same trip. He cannot punish the man without selling him the apples first.

Where it sits in the cabinet

The obvious cousin is Dassin’s next picture, Night and the City, made in London the following year with the committee at his heels. Both films are about a man with a workable plan and an economy that has already decided against him; the difference is that Harry Fabian is a liar and Nick Garcos is not, and both are destroyed by the same machinery. It is a bleaker argument than either film makes alone. Honesty is not a variable.

The technique flowered in exile. The near-silent, procedural attention Dassin pays to a truck being repaired at night is the same attention he would pay to a safe being opened in Rififi — work photographed as work, at its real duration, with the audience made to feel the passage of the minutes. Dassin’s whole method is here: find people doing a difficult physical task, refuse to cut away, and let the suspense come from competence under pressure.

The descendants are the trucker pictures, most of which took the road and left the economics behind. The film’s truest heir is French: Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, four years later, which puts men in lorries with cargo that will kill them and understands, as Dassin did, that the real horror is that they volunteered for the money.

The verdict

Thieves’ Highway is the best film ever made about being underpaid, and I mean that as a large claim. It takes the noir apparatus — the doomed hero, the fatal woman, the night driving, the man who cannot walk away — and points the whole thing at a commission racket in a fruit market, and the apparatus fits perfectly, which tells you something uncomfortable about what the genre was always describing. Conte and Cobb are superb, Cortese is better than the part as written, and Bezzerides supplies a density of working detail that no screenwriter of the period could match because none of them had done the job.

The film is available in restored form and is regularly programmed in Dassin retrospectives, usually as the warm-up for Rififi. Reverse the order. Watch this first, and Rififi stops looking like a caper and starts looking like the same man’s third film about labour.

Spoilers below

The apples are the first betrayal. Figlia keeps Nick out of the market during the hours the fruit is at its peak — Rica’s job — and then buys the load at a price set by the delay he manufactured, paying part in cash and part on a promise. When Nick returns for the balance, the money has become a matter of interpretation, and Figlia’s men take back the cash Nick already has. The theft is complete and there is nothing illegal in it that a court would recognise quickly enough to matter.

Ed Kinney’s truck is the film’s cruellest sequence. The old lorry, overloaded and under-braked, goes off the road on a descent, and Dassin films the aftermath with a detail that has stayed with me for twenty years: the apples. They spill from the wreck and roll down the slope, hundreds of them, still perfectly good, still worth money, and the fire takes them. A man dies and the film’s camera is on the fruit, because the fruit is what he died for and the fruit is what the market will note.

Nick’s revenge is small and physical. He finds Figlia at last and beats him, and the beating is not cathartic — it is two heavy men in a room, badly matched, and Conte plays it as work. The confrontation resolves nothing about the system that produced it; the next agent will do the same thing to the next driver on the next morning, and the film knows this.

Then comes the ending Fox imposed, and it is worth being straight about. The police arrive, Figlia’s racket is exposed, and Nick walks away with Rica towards a plausible future. Bezzerides was reportedly unhappy, and the seam shows — a picture that has spent ninety minutes demonstrating that the law is what Figlia uses on people suddenly produces the law as a solution. What survives it is the imagery. Whatever the last reel asserts, the film’s actual final statement is a hillside of good apples burning while a man lies dead beside them, and no studio note in the world can take that back.