Highway Dragnet

Richard Conte plays Korean War veteran, Jim Henry, who goes on the run after a woman he met in Las Vegas is found murdered. Henry happens upon two women (Joan Bennett and Wanda Hendrix) having car trouble. After fixing their car, he hitches a ride with them. As they travel along, we discover that Henry's not the only one with a secret.

Meanwhile, the dogged detective Joe White Eagle (Reed Hadley) is on Henry's trail.

HIGHWAY DRAGNET is a snappy little noir-thriller. Conte is great in his pursued role, as is Hadley in his. Ms.' Bennett and Hendrix are also well cast.

Recommended for fans of noir-ish chase films...

Highway Dragnet seems like a B movie, and quite a drop in status for Joan Bennett.

Bennett and Richard Conte are the star, along with Wanda Hendrix.

Unjustly accused of the murder of a woman (Mary Beth Hughes) whom he met in a bar, former marine Jim Henry manages to overpower police and take off. After helping two women, Mrs. Cummings, a photographer, and her model, Susan Wilton (Bennett and Hendrix) with a car problem on the highway, Henry wangles a ride.

He has an alibi, a old friend he was with in Vegas who is supposed to help Jim with a problem at his home the next day. And what a problem - it's underwater in the Salton Sea.

With his photo on the front page, and cops coming from all directions, it's not long before Susan and Mrs. Cummings realize who he is - by then, it's too late. After pulling a gun, he pretends to be Cummings' assistant. And he pulls more neat tricks to escape the police. The trio end up taking a hazardous drive in the boiling hot desert.

The movie is notable for showing the old Las Vegas and also Graflex cameras, which were fun to see.

Susan's attraction to Jim after she realizes who he is I found rather odd.

The really odd thing to me was the presence of Bennett, a favorite of director Fritz Lang, the star of many films and a contender for Scarlett O'Hara. Why is it that Harrison Ford at 79 is still playing leads and actresses like Bennett, Merle Oberon, and Lana Turner had to resort to low-budget films?

When it comes to Hollywood, aging in women was fatal back then. It's better now, but I think there is a way to go.

Highway Dragnet is directed by Nathan Juran and written by Herb Meadow, U.S.Anderson, Roger Corman and Jerome Odlum. It stars Richard Conte, Joan Bennett, Wanda Hendrix and Reed Hadley. Music is by Edward J. Kay and cinematography by John J. Martin.

All I did was buy her a drink. One drink, and for 65 cents I bought a martini mixed with dynamite!

Though indexed in some sources as film noir, this barely resonates as such. It is basically a man on the lam picture, where Conte is wrongly accused of murder and has to go on the run to escape police arrest. He hitches with two gals, who start to become wary of their newly acquired companion. So, we have cops trying to capture their target, with near misses and with Reed "The Voice" Hadley heading up the dragnet operation, whilst there's the mystery element of who is the killer hanging in the air. Cast are fine and the production is standard fare, the finale at least serves up an atmospheric locale, and there's some decent snatches of dialogue. But really it's average at best and not one to seek out as a matter of urgency. 5/10

Richard Conte, newly released from the armed forces, is in Las Vegas to meet a friend. First, he has an encounter with a B-girl. The next morning, as he tries to hitch a ride seven miles outside the city, he's picked up by the police under the command of Reed Hadley. The girl has been strangled, and Conte's dog tags were found beneath her. He gets the drop on the cops and high tails it out of town, only to hook up with magazine photographer Joan Bennett and her model, Wanda Hendrix.

There are some big holes in the plot, and some wild coincidences to make everything come out in Hollywood fashion. On the other hand, the actors are solid, Harry Harvey has a small, semi-comical role that advances the plot, and the denouement in a house in the Salton Sea makes a good setting for this early Desert Noir.

Part of the problems in the script can be ascribed to this being the first credited writing and producing job for Roger Corman. He had done some uncredited script work on THE GUNFIGHTER, but now, he had Allied Artists doing the distribution, William Broidy producing and Nathan Juran directing. All were exponents of the we-want-It-Tuesday school of non-excellence.

I guess it was good enough to turn a profit.

Although Miss Bennett is wasted in her role, the other named actors are good, and there are lots of other old-time performers to space things up.

In a Las Vegas casino, just-demobbed Marine (Richard Conte), buying a drink for a case-hardened platinum blonde (Mary Beth Hughes), inadvertently insults her; they have a public spat but kiss and make up, also publicly. Next day he's picked up by the sheriff as the prime suspect in her death by strangulation. He overpowers his captors and sets out on the lam.

Since an all-points bulletin has troopers checking the highways and the state border, he takes up with a couple of women with car trouble. There's a high-profile fashion photographer from New york (the redoubtable Joan Bennett, who helped shape the noir cycle in two early Fritz Lang films); with her is her callow young assistant (Wanda Hendrix). Despite their attempts to ditch him, he sticks with them, ultimately by force, on his journey to the California desert, where he grew up.

Highway Dragnet's title pretty much sums it up: It's a road-chase movie in the fast, flat 50s style, but with a good pulse and a perverse twist or two (alert viewers will pick up on a giveaway clue right after the dog becomes road kill). It also features the other kind of trouper in the person of Iris Adrian, doing what she did better than anybody else: the hash-slinger with a mouth on her.

But the pedestrian, late-noir style undercuts what might have been the film's final showpiece: a final reckoning in Conte's old homestead, under knee-deep water from the floods of the Salton Sea. This strange metaphorical setting gets taken for granted; this was a time when the evocative imagery of earlier film noir had ceded primacy to the literalness of plot.