Hell Drivers

In many ways, "Hell Drivers" reminds me of the French film "The Wages of Fear"...and that is indeed a compliment! Both involve evil trucking companies which seem more than willing to lose a few drivers along the way...all in the name of profits.

The film begins with an ex-con looking for work as a gravel truck driver. Considering he also doesn't have a license, there is no way he should get hired...but is. It seems that all the company cares about is having the drivers make as many runs as possible...and if a few get killed as a result, that's just fine. However, the more runs Tom (Stanley Baker) makes, the more his fellow employees work to sabotage him and keep Red (Patrick McGoohan) the guy with the best record. But there's far more to it than an uncaring employer and nasty co-workers....and Tom only learns the truth late in the film...and it makes for a very tense and exciting finale!

In addition to having an excellent script, this film is great to watch just to see a lot of British actors before they became famous. In addition to Baker and McGoohan, you'll see William Hartnell (the first Dr. Who), Sean Connery, David McCallum, Herbert Lom and Jill Ireland! That's an impressive cast indeed! Overall, a really good film that doesn't insult your intelligence. Well worth your time.

The spirit of 30s Warner Brothers movies lives in this tough, intense thriller about men doing an impossible job-- driving gravel trucks at breakneck speed. (Like the mail service in Only Angels Have Wings, this company loses way too

many men and trucks to make economic sense, but it's great as a movie

pressure cooker for character.) Baker, a largely forgotten star who was the first real working class hero in British films and the precursor to Michael Caine et al. (which, to extend the Warner Bros. analogy, sort of makes him to British cinema what John Garfield was as the first real ethnic American star), is brooding and Eastwood-silent as a new trucker with a past, while a highly interesting cast of character actors includes not only three future movie/TV spy stars, as other

reviewers have noted, but a bunch of ace Carry On-type comedians (Sid James,

Wilfred Lawson, and Alfie Bass), Gun Crazy star Peggy Cummins, the future

Mrs. Charles Bronson (Jill Ireland) and even a Dr. Who (William Hartnell).

Writer-director Endfield, an American blacklistee whose most famous film (and Baker's) would be Zulu ten years later, clearly drew some inspiration from the international art house hit The Wages of Fear, but this movie wisely doesn't seek existential meanings and keeps its B movie soul pure-- and hardboiled.

This film is a remarkably unsentimental look at life for the less fortunate in post-war Britain. There are no tour-de-force performances, but this is not a film that demands them. A group of down on their luck men, finding work, love and friendship where they can, do what they have to do to earn enough money to keep them from crime (more or less), particularly when faced by venal employers who cheat and lie to them daily. There is no union for these men, no legal recourse, no Health and Safety Executive, they have nothing except themselves and the tenuous camaraderie they forge in the down and out bed and breakfasts they have to live in. Driving trucks to ferry gravel from a quarry to a building site, they cut every corner and take their own, and every other road user's, life in their hands as they struggle to get that one more run, that might get them one more pint in the pub. A veritable "who's going to be who" of British actors - Sean Connery, David McCallum, Herbert Lom (okay, Czech, but work with me...), William Hartnell (far from the lovable Dr Who), Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan and Sid James (in a rare straight role) all grimly play men on edge pushed to their limits - and sometimes beyond.

Oh yes - until 1965, there were no speed limits on British roads outside urban areas, which in some respects explains the lack of police.

An oddball movie, a hybrid of (would be) Hollywood tough-guy melodrama and UK kitchen sink sensibility. And yes, starring Dr Who, The Prisoner, 007, Man from UNCLE and many more. Certainly the greatest cast of cult actors ever to appear together, well, ever. This movie is terrible and magnificent in equal measure. To me it is staggeringly watchable. The premise is seriously skewered yet endearing all the same: 1950s English truckdrivers behaving like 1850s American outlaws in a Never Never Land where trucks are allowed to habitually run at 80mph down country lanes without so much a peep from the plod.

McGoohan is a star turn here and Peggy Cummins makes for a surprisingly un-frigid lead (look, the UK film industry in the 1950s didn't do sexy -what do you mean Diana Dors? - proves my point!!). But the film belongs to Baker - brooding, smouldering, moral, vengeful, utterly magnificent. We don't make them like him, or like this any more.

Stanley Baker heads a remarkable cast of high quality British based actors in a rattleing good yarn of corruption and grim macho rivalry. The towering Welsh actor looks and acts every inch the quiet spoken smouldering tough guy character(Tom Yately),a role that he was seemingly born to play, a combination of working class hard-man, reluctant/accidental criminal and passionate lover. A role too that he played in slightly differing forms in several other classic British crime flicks of the 1950's such as ONLY THE GOD DIE YOUNG but in HELL DRIVERS he has distilled the persona to perfection. Tom Yately an itinerant ex con, taking the only job he can find with his dubious background. This leads him to a trucking firm who deliver ballast (gravel/stone)and insist on their drivers (all apparently similar, down at heel ex cons and drifters) running insane risks at illegal speeds in order to earn enough bonus pay to survive and with the promise that if any of them can deliver more loads in a day than the obnoxious foreman, Red, the prize is a solid silver cigarette case worth a small fortune. Tom lands a room in a rough boarding house where most of his workmates also live and so work and it's pressures and rivalries are with him constantly.The landlady is a tough old bird and well capable of dishing out whatever is required to keep order.And she needs to! The other drivers are prone to constant fighting and low-brow practical jokes, one of which lands Tom in a classic confrontation with Red (played by Patrick "The Prisoner" McGoohan)which gives the film one of it's truly great moments of cinematic fury. As the story developes Tom ducks out of a dance hall brawl rather than risk his parole and becomes ostracized by the other drivers who have all been involved and who resent him for his apparent cowardice. Only his the rather more reasonable Italian ex POW, Gino (Herbert"Pink Panther" Lom) remains loyal. There is however the complication of Gino's "girl" (Peggy Cummings)who works at the truck yard. Unlike Gino,she sees herself as a free agent and makes a pitch for Baker.I won't spoil the plot which does have some good twists and turns but I will say that it all ends in rather dramatic, satisfying, if not unexpected violence. McGoohan, as Red, gives a superb performances , one of psychotic, cigar chewing , glowering animal menace. He makes Red the kind of foreman from hell that No-one would argue with. His acid-spitting delivery of lines, boxer-like stance and unkempt appearance simply ooze evil. Its a raw edged version of the rather more sophisticated "No.6" he later made famous in "The Prisoner" . Red could easily be "No.6"s mentally unstable cousin!

Gino is played with warmth and sensitivity by Lom, who's truly a class act, so much more so than his most famous Role of Inspector Dreyfuss in the PINK PANTHER films would have us believe. Peggy Cummings as Lucy, his girlfriend, is also superb; bright, quick, sassy and very attractive. Something of a teaser and everything of a femme fatale full of barely suppressed passion. Her love scenes with Tom are unusually sparky for a 50's British film.

Of the others, where do you start? Sean Connery is there in his pre-007 days. He's good but not yet great, but he looks the part, as in fact do every one of the cast, who were all chosen with great success. Carry-On star Sid James clowns about in some scenes but has a raw edge that reminds us what a damn good straight actor he could be when given the role while Gordon Jackson puts in a similarly gritty performance long before his lasting TV fame of THE PROFESSIONALS. The yard boss, played by the original DR WHO, William Hartnell is another fine piece of casting in what must rank as one of the best British films of the 50's. The story is unusual, a change from the whodunnit's, kitchen sink dramas and Ealing Comedies that were standard fare at the time. The script isn't too peppered with cliches and fairly crackles with tension at times. The action scenes both with the actors and with the trucks are sharply directed (aside from the old trick of speeding up the film at times which was common pactice untill quite recently and always, always looks false!)and every scene is well photographed to portray a grim, earthy working-class world. The characters are real and the performances are superb. It's a fine ensemble piece with a strong but not overpowering star role. Baker is in command but the others do not wither in his shadow and it can't have been by accident that the same star and director later worked together with major international success on ZULU.