A Film Canon

Like Force Of Evil, Thieves' Highway represents a peculiarly systemic critique of capitalism, tracing the trajectory of a single commodity - Golden Delicious apples - in such a way as to clarify the economic ecology that determines and cushions it, while retaining a sufficiently localised ambit to give some sense of the human cost involved, as if translating the representative-sample approach of The Naked City into a more didactic register. In this case, ex-serviceman Nick Garcos (Joe Conte) returns home to discover that his father, a fruit trucker, has been crippled and robbed of his payment by a notorious San Francisco fruit wholesaler (Lee J. Cobb), to which end he disguises himself as a trucker, and heads to the San Frisco fruit market to set things right. Not only does this elaborate the pyramidal, exploitative relationship between picker, trucker and wholesaler, but it identifies it with the claustrophobic, alienating bleakness of the road, whose transitory populus just makes its vacancies all the more striking, as evinced in an accident that leaves Nick trapped beneath his front wheel, but effectively invisible to the hundreds of people passing within metres of his face. Although this is the most symbolically pregnant space in the entire film - particularly evident in a second accident that fuses it with the stark, poetic beauty of the apples themselves - the action quickly shifts to the market, where the majority of the second and third acts occurs, and which is - at least potentially - inimical to this alienation, insofar as it is pervaded by a visceral, palpably human sensuality that is reinforced by Dassin's taste for shooting on location, and culminates with the extraordinary validation of Garcos' idiosyncratic rapport with a local prostitute (Valentina Cortese), placing their violent sexual communications on a continuum with the European, familial wholesomeness that he travelled to San Francisco to protect and which, in an ironic, ambiguous conclusion, he not only fails to reimburse with the payment that he came to reclaim, but doesn't even revisit.