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"If we go over a cliff, wake me up." A trucker's life for Raoul Walsh's scrabblers, "always honest and always broke," sleepless, grease-stained, hounded by collectors. (The Grapes of Wrath is concurrent, though here the desperation of a roadside experience is inseparable from its unruly jocularity.) To be your own boss is the dream for brothers (George Raft, Humphrey Bogart) in the realm of endless highways and greasy spoons. Really a camouflaged Western, motorized wagons and all, sparked by proletarian Warner Brothers existentialism: Finish paying for your rig, up in flames it goes. Straddling road and mansion is the not-quite-domesticated magnate (Alan Hale), who relishes crummy jokes too much to notice the contempt flowing from his wife (Ida Lupino). The melodrama of the second half is just "the clean collar around the grubby neck," with a flashy courtroom breakdown and consequences for Sirk. The ripping view of toilers and hustlers still half-stuck in the Depression is salted with loads of affectionate detail work, from forces of destiny humorously embodied in newfangled technology (the fateful gag revolves around the electric eye of a garage door) to Roscoe Karns' vaudeville turn as a pinball addict. Above all, and most Walshian, is the tough-guy story whose soul really belongs to the women: Ann Sheridan as a café waitress tired of being pawed (complimented on her "classy chassis," she snaps: "Aw, you couldn't even afford the headlights"); Gale Page as Bogart's wife, quietly anxious before his accident and defiantly relieved after; and above all Lupino's glance of murderous passion, a slip of a girl with an engine as ferocious as any truck's. Dassin and Clouzot have variations on the story, but only Walsh has Lupino dutifully shedding a tear for the authorities before sharing a witchy grin with the camera. With John Litel, George Tobias, Charles Halton, Joyce Compton, and Henry O'Neill. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |