Thieves' Highway

Our latest Film Studies series explores the works of leftist writers, directors and actors in the late 1940s, before the McCarthy era interrupted many careers through Hollywood’s self-imposed blacklist. Each film in this five week series (Mondays at 11am) will be introduced in a 15-20 minute talk by writer and film critic Mike Archibald.

Richard Conte is a WWII vet out to avenge his father in Jules Dassin’s blue-collar classic. Lee J. Cobb is the film’s blustery villain, a crooked produce dealer responsible for the crippling of Garcos’s dad. Set in the world of trucking, Thieves’ Highway follows Dassin’s earlier work in using real locations, and in including a wealth of realistic detail. Adapted by A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides from his own novel, this is a film suffused with anger and loaded with slow-burn tension. In making the protagonist a returning soldier, Bezzerides employed a common trope of film noir: that of the WWII veteran who faces confusion and adversity upon his return to America.

Before this film, director Dassin had scored big with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948); the former was a violent prison film and the latter a mystery thriller inflected with documentary elements. Thieves’ Highway is perhaps his finest film, and it would be his last one shot and set in America: not long after its release, he would be blacklisted by the industry.

A bleak portrait of post-WWII despair, corrupt capitalism, and idealistic disillusionment.

Nick Schager, Slant