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The long haul and the produce racket, "this ain't no lace pants business." A Los Angeles homecoming with souvenirs from the seven seas, the sailor's (Richard Conte) own gift is the loss of innocence when he sees his father (Morris Carnovsky) betrayed and maimed. On to San Francisco for sales and revenge, the Army truck loaded with precious Golden Delicious apples and followed by the grizzled partner (Millard Mitchell). Free enterprise according to A.I. Bezzerides, Greeks and Poles and Italians chafing on the road to the busy market of thugs and "wildcat peddlers": The top chiseler (Lee J. Cobb) knows how to cut the legs out from under a man, amid the free agents prowls the prostitute (Valentina Cortese), looking "like chipped glass" and nursing a private melancholia. "A fella tries to make a buck, and that's all." Jules Dassin stages all of it with compact vividness, a less boisterous but more urgent drive by night than Walsh's. A tire blows out along the way, the hero reaches for the jack and finds himself face down in the sand with the weight of the rig resting on his neck, the wound is massaged in a lovely bit composed of roadside whooshing and wandering headlights. The gamut of the war veteran—vengeful behind the wheel, half-asleep at the flophouse, high on a wad of cash, fleeced and bloody at a pier. Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as the razzing/kvetching faces of the lumpenproletariat. (The Soviet montage of the truck wreck is capped with a Dovzhenko image.) Gold-digging blonde fiancée (Barbara Lawrence) versus loyal B-girl ("She uses a club, you use a knife"), capitalism's hatchet lands at last on the knuckles of the big boss. Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) and Kazan (On the Waterfront) take detailed notes. With Tamara Shayne, Norbert Schiller, Edwin Max and Hope Emerson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |