Hell Drivers

The harsh life of a group of lorry drivers. Tension and excitement are the order of the day with this gritty British film.Most of the main players in this film went on to greater success: Stanley Baker is superb as ever. A very atmospheric film with a tense and dramatic end. If you like old British B&W thrillers, this is a must-see.

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 movie shows us a side of the English that most Americans are unfamiliar with. Down, dirty, gritty, and nasty. We see these traits more in ourselves than in our friends across the pond.

As an old trucker, I was practically hypnotized by this movie. If I were still driving it would give me nightmares. A trucking crew, at odds with themselves as well as the owner, practically cut each others throats to become top driver. It is a daily grind consisting of hauling loads of gravel back and forth from a gravel pit to a construction site, rolling over each other as well as everyone else on the road in the process.

It isn't the story that makes this film - it's the cast, action, and direction - in any order you like. Stanley Baker plays the new guy. An ex-con trying to make a new start. Patrick McGoohan plays his antagonist in a truly evil fashion. I thought back and cannot remember seeing Patrick McGoohan in any standout role other than a Columbo re-run. But he really hit the mark here. Probably before he became convinced he was the world's greatest actor. The rest would fill out the Rank Organisation's register. Gordon Jackson (from The Great Escape), Herbert Lom (from the Pink Panther series) as an Italian!, and Sean Connery (pre James Bond) with real hair!

I found myself watching this movie with my mouth open and wondering WHERE WERE THE COPS!

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.

The trucking crew reads like a who's who of male British-based acting talent. Baker, Connery, Sid James (who was a superb straight actor), Lom, Gordon Jackson, etc, under the foremanship of Patrick McGoohan. Back home minding the shop we have David McCallum and in the office, ripping them all off is William Hartnell.

I love the road scenes be they shot at normal speed or otherwise. The language had to be toned down for censorship reasons, otherwise you would find McGoohan calling Baker something a little stronger than yellow belly.

With a cast like that you would expect to see some great performances; and you do. But since Patrick McGoohan has the best role, he stands head and shoulders above the rest as the mad Irishman who swigs Guiness at the wheel, and who can lose a fight and still have his cigarette sticking out of his mouth.

I love this film.