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.
