Review of Thieves' Highway (1949) by Paul Z — 15 Mar 2009

Frankly, I am starting to imagine the Criterion Collection slipping from the exaltation of truly great and truly important movies and into an affectation of movies that just happen to be pleasures of theirs. Their new cover for Jules Dassin's unremarkable final American film is a gritty deep-focus sepia image of a country road with spilled apples in the foreground. In one essay "from the Current" on Criterion's website by a Dassin enthusiast claims that Thieves' Highway is her favorite Dassin film "because the human relationships are drawn so exactingly, so tellingly, and so tragically. Even Lee J. Cobb's villain is nuanced and complex, understandable as a product of the system every bit as much as Richard Conte." Well, this is true, but it is true to the extent that it is normally true with 1940s noir, whether it's good or great. It really isn't a significant step for its genre, its time or its director.

Having first seen Rififi before seeing even Night and the City or The Naked City, it might be easy for me to be let down. Rififi is a masterpiece of the crime genre, a distilled heist picture made with a watchmaker's exactitude by an American director who never planned to make it, never thought he'd be in the position to feel the need to, and yet to discern the film from the signature tone and style of other French noir from the 1950s by the likes of Melville is not an issue. I look at Thieves' Highway, about a war-veteran-turned-truck driver who seeks revenge for the robbing and crippling of his father at the hands of an dissipated produce hustler, and I can't help but feel a deep lack of originality, or at least an interesting yarn which Dassin allows to sleepwalk to the tune of so many pat, tiring clichés of its era.

I suppose one could interpret the film as a parable of a person who performs routine tasks in a society losing his purity and earning his place in the cutthroat privately and corporately owned existence, uninterrupted between capitalism and corruption. The high points are the arcs of the peripheral characters, like Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as shady but oddly conscionable lackeys for Lee J. Cobb's seemingly friendly, deeply ruthless villain, or simply the brazen Italian-American stereotypes that open the film, the hero's parents who make food, sing opera and can be heard all the way down the street.