The Historical Significance of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949)

By N.S.

Thieves’ Highway, which Red Eddie Mueller re-broadcast on June 19th, is a hack crime drama which wasted a great deal of talent:

Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Oakie, Millard Mitchell and stunning, shapeley, “eternal starlet” Barbara Lawrence.

David in TN, who likewise thought little of the picture, cited the Film Noir Guide: “Conte is a veteran who returns from the war to find that his truck driver father has lost both legs in an ‘accident’ deliberately caused by a crooked produce wholesaler (Cobb) to avoid paying the old man for his load. Vowing revenge, Conte teams up with Mitchell to deliver two truckloads of apples to Cobb who, aided by a seductive hooker (Cortese), proceeds to cheat Conte out of his money.

“Reminiscent of They Drive by Night, Thieves’ Highway has a convincing, fast-moving plot, and the actors are excellent, especially Cobb as the shady wholesaler and Cortese as the femme fatale with second thoughts.

“Soon after he made Thieves' Highway, Director Jules Dassin (Brute Force, The Naked City, and Two Smart People) was identified as a Communist by fellow director Edward Dmytryk during House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.”

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Leaving aside They Drive by Night, Thieves’ Highway’s plot is completely unconvincing. Indeed, its plot is ridiculous. We’re supposed to believe that one man after another, whose subsistence depends on being able to borrow money for a rig, with which to buy, deliver, and sell fresh produce, would let himself be cheated, robbed, maimed and murdered by a rat like Mike Figlia (Cobb), who would just continue on without resistance?

The guilty party was “Buzz” (Albert Isaac) Bezzerides (1908-2007), who furnished the hackneyed script. According to Red Eddie, Thieves’ Highway was a roman a clef, in which Bezzerides told of how Hollywood ripped him off, like the poor, exploited truckers in the story. The reality was that Bezzerides did very well off of Hollywood, better than he deserved.

Figlia (Cobb) hires hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Rica (Valentina Cortese) to pick up and thereby distract heroic trucker Nick Garcos (Richard Conte), so Figlia’s men can slash Nick’s tires, and then, after Figlia pays him, rob him of every penny. (Dassin gets around the Hays Code by having Nick “nap” at Cortese’s place.)

When Nick’s fiance, Polly Faber (Barbara Lawrence), learns that he’s been robbed of their honeymoon money, she leaves him, which gives the whore the chance to prove herself the real heroine of the story.

The significance of the picture is that Lee J. Cobb got to play the murderous “Johnny Friendly,” and they got to see Valentina Cortese, who in real life may have been a whore, but who definitely did not have a heart of gold. Cobb became famous to movie audiences in his role as labor racketeer Johnny Friendly, in Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s masterpiece, On the Waterfront (1954). But that performance was a do-over. Cobb’s original performance was right here.

(Not to mention, that On the Waterfront was a case of movie journalism, its screenplay being based in part on real people (e.g., Father Barry [Karl Malden] was based on Father John Corridan; tragic hero Kayo Dugan (Pat Henning) was based on Corridan acolyte Arthur Browne.), and the picture being the greatest anti-Communist movie ever made, even if few viewers understood its intent, just as few viewers understood the pro-Communist intent of Carl Foreman and Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 masterpiece, High Noon.)

Schulberg won a much-deserved Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Waterfront, besting one of the greatest screenplays ever written, director Joe Mankiewicz’ screen novel, The Barefoot Contessa. The year of A Star is Born was a very good year. It proved to be the last year of the Golden Age of the Sound Era (1939-1954)

Valentina Cortese became famous through her performance in Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night, as a middle-aged actress who has one brief scene she just can’t get right, and which requires take after take after take, in a sort of cinematic hell.

Cortese got nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but Ingrid Bergman won the little man, even though her hysterical performance as a servant in Murder on the Orient Express did not deserve a nomination. When Bergman won the Oscar, she reportedly said that Cortese had deserved it.

It was clearly favoritism that got Bergman that undeserved nomination and Oscar, but it may have been a justifiable hostility that cost Cortese her Oscar.

Valentina Cortese was a monster. She married Richard Basehart, bore him a daughter, and then kidnapped the girl off to Italy, where she prevented her husband from ever seeing his child again.

Only in fiction could Valentina Cortese have a heart of gold.