In many ways HELL DRIVERS resembles the great American western SHANE . A stranger with a past walks in to town and finds that getting on with his life is not going to be possible due to outside dynamics . It lacks the colour and feel good factor of George Stevens genre masterpiece and possibly the internal conflicts but as a piece of gritty melodrama the film delivers
The plot revolves around ex-con Tom signing up for a road haulage firm and blacklisted American director Cy Endfield shoots the movie in a combination of film noir and British realist drama style . The scenes involving lorries zooming along English country roads with intrusive music does seem somewhat melodramatic but rightly Endfield concentrates on the character driven plot . Most of the drama centres around Tom's place within the firm's hierarchy where he's at the very bottom of the food chain and is singled out for the attention of violent bully " Red " Redman . Tom's lack of popularity nosedives further when he decides to walk away from a punch up at a dance hall
This is a very well acted film . Stanley Baker isn't an obvious choice for a mild mannered everyman but he pulls the role off very well . There's a host of faces who'd be well known in 1957 like Hartnell , Lom , James and Jackson alongside lesser known faces such as Connery and McCallum . Best performance is by Patrick McGoohan as Red the workmate from hell who is the stuff nightmares are made from . He also has a strangely prophetic line where he states he's not a prison warder !
If there's a problem with HELL DRIVERS it's that the story has too much melodramatic roots and is tied up a little too easily . Being a firm that is breaking the law Tom knows too much for his own good so the bad guys of the firm have to silence him which leads to an ending that seems at odds with the film's social grittiness . If the firm was law abiding Tom would still have found himself with the same problems from his workmates but Tom leaving the firm to work for a new company would have been very anti-climatic
The plot revolves around ex-con Tom signing up for a road haulage firm and blacklisted American director Cy Endfield shoots the movie in a combination of film noir and British realist drama style . The scenes involving lorries zooming along English country roads with intrusive music does seem somewhat melodramatic but rightly Endfield concentrates on the character driven plot . Most of the drama centres around Tom's place within the firm's hierarchy where he's at the very bottom of the food chain and is singled out for the attention of violent bully " Red " Redman . Tom's lack of popularity nosedives further when he decides to walk away from a punch up at a dance hall
This is a very well acted film . Stanley Baker isn't an obvious choice for a mild mannered everyman but he pulls the role off very well . There's a host of faces who'd be well known in 1957 like Hartnell , Lom , James and Jackson alongside lesser known faces such as Connery and McCallum . Best performance is by Patrick McGoohan as Red the workmate from hell who is the stuff nightmares are made from . He also has a strangely prophetic line where he states he's not a prison warder !
If there's a problem with HELL DRIVERS it's that the story has too much melodramatic roots and is tied up a little too easily . Being a firm that is breaking the law Tom knows too much for his own good so the bad guys of the firm have to silence him which leads to an ending that seems at odds with the film's social grittiness . If the firm was law abiding Tom would still have found himself with the same problems from his workmates but Tom leaving the firm to work for a new company would have been very anti-climatic