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Thieves’ Highway

Agricultural Noir

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Today is Cesar Chavez day, a state holiday in California, where our Golden State bounty still depends on migrant farm workers, willing to do the back-breaking work of gathering lettuce and hand-picking tomatoes for urban and suburban dining tables.

Now, film noir has always tackled serious issues … from antisemitism (Crossfire) to rampant materialism (The Prowler), it’s embraced themes bigger budgets wouldn’t touch (and thereby earned some of the genre’s best writers and directors a spot on the McCarthy-era blacklist).

So if you’ve already seen The Grapes of Wrath–surely one of the most elegiac films ever made–and you’re not close enough to drive to Salinas and the John Steinbeck Center–you might want to consider watching an actual agricultural noir in honor of farm workers.

First choice is 1949’s Thieves’ Highway, which I’ve blogged about before. Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb … and magnifcently directed by the brilliant Jules Dassin, whom we lost just last year. This film is one of my favorite twenty-five noirs of all time … and written by the equally brilliant A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides, who also penned Kiss Me Deadly and They Drive By Night, among other classics. Renowned for its realistic depiction of the produce market in San Francisco, this film will never let you look at apples the same way again.

I’d also recommend Border Incident (also 1949) with George Murphy, Howard da Silva and Ricardo Montalban, also previously discussed and readily available on DVD … it will never let you look at threshers the same way again, either.

But for those of you who look for the truly esoteric … which would probably include everyone reading this … try to find Juke Girl (1942), the noir I mentioned last week. It’s the oddest, most bizarre little film I’ve seen in years, and not the least so because it stars Ronald Reagan as a rabble-rousing farm/unionist/cooperative worker fighting a corrupt business monopoly.

Yeah. I know. I remember the ’80s, too. But this was Reagan’s flirtation with leftist politics, pre agro-business. The script, not coincidentally, was also written by Bezzerides (his first film credit), and reads like a poor man’s (make that a very poor man’s) version of Thieves’ Highway.

Ann Sheridan, George Tobias, Gene Lockhart and Howard da Silva round out the noir cred cast … though its cred was never in question with me because it came recommended by Eddie Muller. I finally caught it on TCM when it aired a few weeks ago. Ably directed by Curtis Bernhardt (an under-appreciated stylist of noirs Conflict, Possessed and The High Wall), the relentlessly swing-filled score–which continues to jump, jive and wail even in dramatic moments–will make you scratch your head in wonder, when you’re not wondering at Reagan as a leftist farmer.

So tonight–when you’re digging into some organic greens or slicing a cherry tomato–think about the people who helped get it there, and kick back and watch a noir.

With fresh produce and lines like this: “Look bud, every time a freight train shakes itself fleas like you come hopping out” … you won’t go hungry.

Thieves’ Highway: Want an Apple?

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The next time you’re feeling up the produce at your favorite mart, considering which juicy apple to sink your teeth into, you might be surprised to find yourself thinking instead of Richard Conte.

I know I’ve never been able to eat an apple with the same air of nonchalance since my first viewing of Thieves’ Highway(1949).

This week we’re looking at that paragon of noir cinema as the start of a new/old theme for Writing in the Dark. Though other news will inevitably preempt our schedule, I thought it was time to discuss some of the films on my personal “top ten noir” list. These are films I love unabashedly, films that have influenced me, haunted me, pursued me down dark rainy pavements, and made me question my produce purchases.

We’re starting with Thieves’ Highway because it currently lodges at #10 and because Jules Dassin, its brilliant and blacklisted director (and the genius behind Night and the City, The Naked City, Brute Force and Rififi) passed away a few weeks ago at the age of 96. With the loss of Dassin and Widmark, the world is much darker, and not in a good noir way.

Thieves’ Highway is a gut-wrench of a political movie, a social-commentary on the efforts of the working man to earn an honest living in a world that doesn’t reward it — not even in the seemingly pure and innocuous produce trade.

Conte (and he was never better) brings a capacity for violence that few leading actors shared: Cagney, Bogart, Lancaster, and few others. Conte played both good guys and bad guys so effectively, because he seems like an in-between guy … in other words, like one of us.

In Dassin’s cinematic tone poem set in San Francisco’s once thriving produce mart, Nick Garcos (Conte) is a war veteran who returns from a world war to a personal one: his father has been financially and physically crippled by a racketeering produce kingpin, Mike Figlia (a world-class performance by Lee J. Cobb). Determined to redeem his family’s honor and salvage its fortune, he teams with Ed, another trucker, to bring an early shipment of Golden Delicious into San Francisco.

Naturally, Figlia tries to dupe him, as he did Nick’s father. He employs a prostitute (a riveting and ravishing Valentina Cortese — whom I had the privilege of seeing in person at a play in Rome many years ago) to distract Nick so he can steal the cargo of apples. Meanwhile, Ed (played by Millard Mitchell, an actor better known as the studio mogul in Singin’ in the Rain) still hasn’t brought his truck through. A dangerous contest of pride and revenge between Nick and Figlia erupts, leading to increasingly violent consequences.

Dassin’s shots and ace writer Buzz Bezzerides (whom we just lost last January) populate their canvas with lyrical chiaroscuro and lines sharper than an unripe Granny Smith. The social commentary is pithy and pointed: it’s obvious that Nick’s waspy fiancee is interested only in his prospects for wealth; she’s the real femme fatale, not Cortese’s passionate yet moral hooker. In a brilliant casting stroke, Jack Okie, a hot theater ticket in the early ’30s and known for his comedy, is cast as “Slob,” one of Figlia’s henchmen, and the rest of the supporting cast is superb, including later director Joseph Pevney as Slob’s partner, Pete.

Moments in this film will haunt you, but particularly a shot of golden delicious apples rolling down a highway embankment. I experienced Thieves’ Highway at a Noir City a couple of years ago, and this shot is literally one of the most memorable of any film I’ve seen.

At one point in Thieves’ Highway, Nick asks Rica (Cortese) about fruit:

Rick: Hey, do you like apples?
Rica: Everybody likes apples … except doctors.
Nick: Do you know what it takes to get an apple so you can sink your beautiful teeth in it? You gotta stuff rags up tailpipes, farmers gotta get gypped, you jack up trucks with the back of your neck, universals conk out …
Rica: I don’t know what are you talking about, but I have a new respect for apples.

Rent Thieves’ Highway, and you’ll appreciate your produce like never before.