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Thieves' Highway (1949)

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18 comments in total

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19 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Beautiful, Haunting, Heartfelt Noir, 15 April 2003

Author: secragt from United States

I've seen many hundreds of noir movies and this is one of the very very best. The triumvirate of Conte, Cortez and Cobb have never been better and if Dassin's simple but heartfelt story of betrayal and redemption doesn't tug at you hard, you must be made of stone. Cobb has never been more convincingly merciless; I get angry just thinking about his brilliant performance. Cortez is sexuality incarnate but she displays real range and sensitivity as the one person who first destroys Conte's life then ultimately redeems it. Conte, who is always reliable, is absolutely at his best as the desperately driven truck driver who sets out to right a terrible wrong but soon learns that you can't beat the system. The last shot of the fruit rolling down the hill has to be one of the most evocative and heartbreaking in all of noir. This movie haunts and moves me whenever I think about it and is one of those buried low budget classics that must be seen to be believed. First rate in all regards despite the meager funds and gets to deeper feelings and emotions than ten $100 million dollar-budgeted present day pictures combined. Trust me on this one...Thieves' Highway is hard to find but absolutely worth it!

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18 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Dassin on a roll!, 28 January 2005

Author: John Primavera (jpseacadets@cox.net) from San Diego, CA, USA

Beginning with his compelling "Brute Force" ('47)followed by the richly atmospheric "Naked City" ('48), Jules Dassin became the hottest dealer in Hollywood of the Film-Noir genre. "Thieves Highway" adds ethnic tensions to the Dassin stew of lost souls always living at the edge of danger. Richard Conte was at his peak here as the tough trucker, quick to throw a punch when he's threatened and equally capable of rolling with them if necessary. In Robert Siodmak's "Cry of the City," he's held in a headlock by a butch Hope Emerson; in this one, a jack gives way and a truck fender lands on his neck....ouch!

Conte, like Burt Lancaster, came from a streetwise background that, second only to a boxing ring, fitted him neatly as a glove when it came to movies like "Thieves Highway." Conte was so good in this, he was selected to repeat the role on TV six years later under the title "Overnight Haul" on the old 20th Century-Fox Hour.

As for Dassin, he had yet a fourth fling at the genre the following year with the claustrophobic thriller, "Night and the City." A film worth commenting on later. As for "Thieves Highway," having seen it, you may want to follow it up with Clouzot"s "Wages of Fear," made three years later and the ultimate truckers' movie. As a boy I was privileged to have seen all four Dassin movies during their original releases. How thrilling to see "Thieves Highway" and "Night and the City" now out on DVD!

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14 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Dassin & Conte: masters at work, 6 October 1999
Author: mackjay from Out there in the dark

A wonderfully compelling, dark character study from Jules Dassin. Thieves' Highway ranks with the director's best: Brute Force, Night and the City, Topkapi. As usual the camera work is fluid and interesting, the plot unconventional (a lone truckdriver against the powerful racket boss, intimidatingly portrayed by Lee J. Cobb.) There's a terrific highway chase scene and intense performances by all actors. A major feature: the great Richard Conte. It's time this artist of American film and TV was recognized. Look him up in IMDb for an astonishing array of film noir roles and tv appearances (eg, The Twilight Zone:"Perchance to Dream"). As the protagonist of Thieves' Highway, Conte delivers an emotional, nuanced performance as a man in a dark conflict. It's a downright shame that this terrific film is not available in any video format. I learned of it from noir listings, and when it showed up on AMC (at 4am, I think) I managed to get it on tape. If you like film noir, Dassin or Conte see this film under any circumstance!!

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14 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
A movie like this keeps the doctor away, 5 June 2006

Author: imogensara_smith from New York City

Thieves' Highway opens with a view of sunny Fresno, California, a hay cart passing in the foreground—not the setting you'd expect for a film noir. But as this movie shows, the business of transporting and selling fruit and vegetables is as cut-throat and corrosive as any criminal enterprise. Directed by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Jules Dassin and starring left-wing Group Theater veterans Lee J. Cobb and Richard Conte, Thieves' Highway is really an expose of the rotten heart of capitalism; everyone in the movie is obsessed with making a buck. The central symbol is apples: nourishing and wholesome, corrupted when they are equated with money. A Polish farmer, enraged at being paid less than he was promised for his apples, flings boxes of them off a truck, screaming, "Seventy-five cents! Seventy-five cents!" When the truck later runs off the road, careens down a hillside and explodes, there is a haunting, silent image of the scattered apples rolling down the slope. When the hero finds out that money-grubbers have gone out to collect the dead trucker's apples and sell them, he begins kicking over crates of apples, fuming, "Four bits a box!"

The hero is Nick Garcos, a navy veteran who returns home to find that his Greek immigrant father has lost both legs in a trucking accident caused by a crooked produce dealer named Mike Figlia. Bent on revenge, Nick teams up with a trucker named Ed to haul the season's first Golden Delicious apples to San Francisco, where he'll be able to track down Figlia. There's an evocative montage sequence of the grueling overnight drive, at the end of which Nick arrives at the produce market, already bustling before daybreak. Figlia spots him and immediately plans to cheat him as he did his father. He hires a local prostitute, Rica, to distract Nick while he steals his load. Meanwhile Ed, having trouble with his truck, is still hours away. Figlia's plans go awry when Rica falls for Nick, and Nick turns out to be tougher and quicker on the uptake than his father. Prone to issuing threats such as, "Gyp me and I'll cut your heart out," he squeezes fair payment out of Figlia and excitedly calls his girl-next-door fiancée to meet him so they can get married, despite his obvious attraction to Rica. Nice girl Polly turns out to be even more interested in money than the prostitute. Figlia's methods turn increasingly violent, leading to a showdown with Nick in a roadhouse.

Most of Thieves' Highway was filmed on location in Frisco's produce market and nearby waterfront, gritty and vibrant settings bustling with trucks and pushcarts and shouting men, dripping produce, ashcan fires, crowded diners and seedy bars. The film's acting has the same visceral naturalism, from Lee J. Cobb's crass, blustery, hypocritical thug to Millard Mitchell's tough-as-nails trucker. Richard Conte gives a stunning physicality to his role as a hot-headed yet intelligent man who is easily the world's most elegant truck driver. He uses his intense gaze and graceful movements to charismatic effect and reacts to his surroundings with vivid sensuality. The high point and heart of the movie are the sexy scenes between Nick and Rica. Often confined in her small bedroom, they circle each other warily, alternating between barbed hostility and explosive passion. During their first kiss, they look on the verge of getting into serious trouble with the Hays Office. When Nick initially resists her advances, Rica taunts him, "What's the matter, don't you like girls?" "Sure I like girls," he replies, "I always wished I had a kid sister, wearing pigtails down to here…You were somebody's kid sister once." Escaping from the cliché of the whore with a heart of gold, Valentina Cortese is a mercurial blend of playfulness, hurt and defiance. She displays open lust for Conte—digging her nails into his bare chest, rubbing her dark curls in his face—that is rare for the forties. Contrary to the pattern in many noirs, in Thieves' Highway lust does not corrupt, as greed does. It belongs with the life-affirming, humane side of the movie: with Nick's warm and loving immigrant parents, with Ed's unexpected decency when he saves Nick's life after a roadside accident, with the beautiful vision of the Polish farmer's orchard and its bounty of fresh golden apples.

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12 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Keep On Truckin', 26 August 2006

Author: ccthemovieman-1 from Lockport, NY, United States

This was a pretty good film noir - nothing spectacular - involving a crooked trucking boss, "Mike Figlia" effectively played by Lee J. Cobb who was good at playing nasty villains. In this story, a young trucker, "Nick Garcos" (Richard Conte) whose father was ruined by Cobb, goes after him to settle the score. Nick drives up north to San Francisco to seek him out but has some rough going himself, until the end.

This had interesting characters and a different type of female lead in European actress Valentina Cortese, who was good film noir material.

The story moves pretty fast with few, if any, lulls, yet seems longer than it's 93 minutes. I found this was one of those films I liked a lot better the first time than the second, lowering my rating. It's definitely still a film to check out if you're a film noir fan.

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10 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
a late bloom in market maturity through a long fuse of revenge, 27 February 2005

Author: (Zeleny@post.harvard.edu) from Mt Olympus, Hollywood Hills, CA, U.S.A.

A lovely, richly nuanced tale of an edgy middle-age boy belatedly growing into manhood, Thieves' Highway features an understated star turn by Richard Conte as WWII combat vet Nick Garcos, against scene-chewing villainy by Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt produce wholesaler Mike Figlia. Among its numerous excellences, enjoy lapidary character development by Morris Carnovsky and Tamara Shayne as Nick's parents Yanko and Parthena; gruff and subtle supporting turns by Millard Mitchell as Ed Prentiss, his ill-fated partner in a spontaneous trucking venture, and Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as Slob and Pete, their ruthless, yet ultimately scrupulous competitors; and deceit and counterfeit by Valentina Cortese and Barbara Lawrence as Rica and Polly Faber, the whore and the madonna vying for Nick's favors at different times, in different ways, and for wildly different reasons. Jules Dassin's filmed version of Albert Isaac "Buzz" Bezzerides' socially responsive novel resonates with the allegory of a tough yet guileless prole losing his innocence and earning his place in the ruthless capitalist continuum between commerce and crime. The Criterion Collection DVD, short on extras, delivers on quality.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
A huge David Lynch influence, 6 December 2006

Author: janus_weathervane from Los Angeles, United States

This film was a huge influence on David Lynch when he was studying film at AFI and you'll find references to it in every film he's made since then -- The grinding gears in Eraserhead, the downtown soundscapes of that film, Dune & The Elephant Man, orchard visuals in The Straight Story, and most directly Isabella Rossellini reprising Valentina Cortese in Blue Velvet.

I'd go so far as to say Blue Velvet is a scene-for-scene crib of Thieves Highway in theme and all its major details, with Dennis Hopper as Lee J. Cobb. Conte's legless father is mirrored in Jeffrey's stroke-ridden father. Both come back from independent lives of young adulthood to help their struggling families in a stultifying world of greed. Both have the corn-fed woman they love and the Italian demoiselle they sleep with. Both find their lives endangered by a corrupt crime boss. There, is that ten lines?

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Another Gem from Jules Dassin, 3 September 2005

Author: Werner from Munich, Germany

I have stumbled over the works of Jules Dassin only lately, first the atmospheric and gripping "Night and the City" and now "Thieves Highway", something you would certainly label a sociological drama today. Rchard Conte as a guy out on the mission to avenge the death of his brother and the crippling of his father from indirectly the hands of a corrupt fruit market guy. Wonderful acting by all main people, Richard Conte, Lee J Cobb, Millard Mitchell, and the Italian actress who never made it to a status that i can recall her name without checking the credits again... Dire portrait of the fight for existence of the trucker guys, the ways the retailer controls both ends of the supply chain and the mean and dark ways in a big market. Vegetables and fruits may just be a metaphor for something else, you see.... If you can get it on cable or DVD, don't let it pass by.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
So Much for the American Dream, 28 December 2006

Author: brocksilvey from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Richard Conte plays a hot head recently returned from the Navy, who jumps in on a business deal out of personal vengeance when he finds out that a crooked produce dealer (played in a characteristically tiresome performance by Lee J. Cobb) not only cheated his father, but also caused him to lose use of his legs in an auto accident. He teams up with Millard Mitchell (giving a wonderfully gruff performance) to deliver a load of apples to Cobb in San Francisco. But Conte finds out that the dirty dealings surrounding the produce market in the big city are plentiful, and he and Cobb begin a cat and mouse game to see who can swindle who. And just to complicate matters, an enigmatic gamine (played by Valentina Cortese) shows up and takes a hankering to Conte. Is she playing him straight, or is she part of the whole corrupt mess?

Director Jules Dassin uses the rather mundane premise -- delivering a load of apples to a fruit market -- to frame a haunting and striking chronicle of one man's nightmare journey from the cosy confines of small-town America to the jangling, sinister and shadowy worlds of its urban jungles. **POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD** Though Dassin gives us a happy ending, it's a qualified one. After all, Conte turns his back on his devoted girl and his family to join the denizens of the city, and chooses the allure of the "worldy" vamp over that of the pristine virgin. In an America shaken up by WWII and desperately wanting to believe in the white picket American dream, this bitter pill of a film suggests that that dream isn't for everyone.

With Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as a pair of rival apple sellers, who bring some nice shading to their supporting plot line.

Grade: A

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
A fine Jules Dassin film, a bit over-balanced by Lee J. Cobb's criminally sly performance, 6 February 2008

Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Jules Dassin directed, in my opinion, two great dramas that happened to be crime films, Night and the City (1950) and Rififi (1955). Earlier, he made two near-great crime films, Naked City (1948), a little dated now, and Brute Force (1947). For me, Thieves' Highway (1949) pauses right in the middle, both in terms of the year made and in terms of the success of the story. The movie tells us about Nick Garcos (Richard Conte), who returns home from working at sea with presents for his family and his fiancé. He discovers that his father, a long-haul produce trucker, has lost his legs in a trucking accident after delivering tomatoes to produce broker Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb) in San Francisco. It looks like Figlia also stole back the money his father had been paid by Figlia. Nick is determined to settle scores. He sets out with an old-time hauler to deliver apples to Figlia, and plans to do whatever it takes to even things out. It doesn't work out so easily for Nick. The happy ending Darryl F. Zanuck shot and added to the film without Dassin's knowledge doesn't help matters. Zanuck's contribution starts with Nick meeting Figlia in a bar by a highway, a fight and ends with Nick and Rica, a woman he met after his fiancé dumped him and who earns her money from men, driving off together. I'm not sure that whatever the original ending was Dassin had in mind would have improved the film. As it is, I think this movie of retribution is masterfully directed, filled with realism, contains several first-rate sequences and is photographed with great style and mood. The truck crashing off the highway, with boxes of apples tumbling off and the apples rolling down the hill toward us is startling. So why don't I like it as much as I think I should? The quick and secondary answer is that I learned more than I needed about produce. It's difficult to make a great movie when crucial plot points turn on whether a bunch of Golden Delicious apples are too mealy. The primary answer is the acting.

I have great admiration for Richard Conte, who plays Nick Garcos. He was always watchable and he got even better as he aged. Most of his career in Hollywood was spent playing second leads or shrewd villains in A movies and leads in B movies. He never managed the traction to move up to Hollywood hero parts. I can't explain it well in words, but Conte, who could be tightly coiled and energetic, lacked in my view a certain amount of charisma that could drive a part into your head. He's very good in Thieves' Highway, but he only occasionally involves me emotionally. (As opposed, for instance, to the loser Harry Fabian played by Richard Widmark in Night and the City; it's tough playing nice leads in noirs.) Valentina Cortese has the looks, the style and the sense of vulnerability to do a good job as Rica, but she doesn't have the language skills. She has a hard time breaking past the language barrier from Italian into English. This hurts the character and it hurts the scenes between her and Conte. On the other side of the scale there's Lee J. Cobb as Mike Figlia. Says Dassin roughly quoting Cobb on Cobb's view of Figlia, "I can outsmart any of the guys and I do what I want to do...law is what I make it...and I have fun with it." And that, says Dassin, is what underlies Cobb's whole performance.

We don't like or trust Figlia, but he's sure a piece of work. We enjoy his untrustworthiness. In my view, the balance of interest between Nick and Figlia always tips toward Figlia, thanks to Cobb's skill in the part. And there's Millard Mitchell as Nick's "partner." I think this might be the finest performance of Mitchell's long career. When he and Conte share scenes, it's like pairing up a real-life worn-out long haul driver with a good young actor. That's not criticism of Conte, it's praise for Mitchell.

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