Hell Drivers, a British film released in 1957, is a top-notch work of entertainment. Plotted like a Western, the movie involves truck drivers hauling "ballast" (gravel) for a corrupt firm. There are apparently 13 drivers and their job is to haul gravel from a quarry to a construction site about ten miles distant. The route leads over narrow country roads with many hairpin turns and deep flooded potholes. The men have to load their own trucks at the gravel pit. Twelve runs daily are required -- if you don't meet that quota, you are fired. The top hauler, a thug named Red, is reckless and a bully but he makes 18 runs daily and, therefore, has been awarded a solid gold cigarette case by the vicious boss. The film features wild road-races between the truckers shot with alarming speeded-up motion -- curiously, the effect of cranking the footage to speed up the action is highly effective and the images of the battered dump trucks roaring over the winding, ruinous highways are thrilling. I suspect that George Miller, the Australian director of the "Mad Max" films saw this movie and, even, studied it closely before making his pictures featuring heavy vehicles careening over treacherous desert highways -- the film's action sequences have the organized over-the-top frenzy that Miller orchestrates in his movies, particularly his early pictures Mad Max and The Road Warrior.
Hell Drivers, written and directed by C. Raker Endfield (later known as Cy Endfield), follows the format of the classical Western action film. The movie's narrative seems derived from Howard Hawks' films and Hemingway's prose. A loner appears in a country village looking for work. The hero, Tom (although his first name is mysteriously Joe) gets hired as a replacement for a driver horribly injured in an earlier crash -- the man has a "silver plate" in his skull. Joe is shown the round-trip 20 miles route and encouraged to drive at breakneck speed by a cynical trainer. When Joe asks the trainer to drive them back to the garage, the man says he can't operate the truck -- the police have taken his license for speeding. Joe takes a room in a boarding house where the truckers lodge and masters the route. Immediately, he is bullied by Red, the man driving the firm's number 1 truck -- all the trucks bear numbers (Tom's been assigned the hard luck number 13). Red holds the coveted gold cigarette case and pushes everyone else around. It's obvious that he and Tom are on a collision course. Tom is befriended by an Italian immigrant, Gino. Gino's girlfriend, Lucy, falls for Tom. The virtuous Tom, who turns out to be an ex-convict, rebuffs the woman, but, in the end, she seduces him. There's an obligatory fistfight between the truckers and local hoodlums at a dance -- this has the flavor of a brawl in a Western saloon. Tom can't really join in the fight, presumably because he's on probation. This causes the other truckers (except for Gino) to despise him and call Tom a "yellow-belly." There are more breakneck road-races and Tom begins to best Red in the number of loads hauled. Red and his buddies sabotage Tom and try to drive him off the road. But Tom is too cunning himself and skilled to be successfully deterred. He even follows a secret shortcut pioneered by Red, the highly dangerous "Limestone Quarry" road, a primitive lane that runs along a deep precipice. Gino offers to help Tom by switching the numbers on the trucks -- he will drive Tom's 13 and let Tom operate under his number 3. But, before this plot can be implemented, Tom has sex with Lucy, Gino's girl, and filled with guilt and shame decides to quit his job and buys a one-way (third-class) train ticket to London. Gino, who isn't aware of Tom's plan to get out of Dodge, substitutes the numbers on the trucks, is driven off the road by Red (who thinks he's Tom) and crashes. Badly burned, Gino is dying in the hospital. At his bedside, Lucy lies to the dying man, saying that she hopes Gino will recover so she can marry him. She admits that the contract with the construction firm called for 18 drivers and not 13 and that the trucking company management is pocketing the extra money, hiring immigrants and "drifters" like Tom, to avoid the consequences of this larceny. (These drivers are deemed expendable). Enraged, Tom goes back to the trucking firm, confronts the boss, and threatens to expose him. This sets up the final spectacular road race in which Tom and Red (who has the cowering boss in tow) fight it out, truck to truck and bumper to bumper on the deadly Limestone Quarry Road.
The film is briskly plotted and lucidly directed with exciting action scenes. However, the picture is most notable for its excellent cast. Stanley Baker, a working class hero, plays Tom. (There's a Dickensian subplot involving Tom's crippled brother, that part acted by a very young David McCallum -- later to be cast memorably as Ilya Kurykin in The Man From Uncle and "Duckie" in NCIS.) Jill Ireland plays Lucy, the dispatcher at the trucking company, and Herbert Lom is memorably vicious as the boss. Patrick McGoohan, later famous for his role as Number 6 in The Prisoner series, is fantastic as the villainous Red, snarling and sneering at his colleagues with his forehead marked with a long, jagged scar. (After a ferocious fist fight in which he is beaten by Tom, Red says: "He kneed me, otherwise I woulda killed him.") The movie presents a peculiar mix of neo-realist dirty dishes locations (for instance, the lower depths boarding house) and flamboyant actions sequences. At the climax, Red's truck falls off the cliff into the bottomless limestone quarry -- with the same aplomb that George Miller would show in the Mad Max movies a twenty years later, Endfield cuts to the interior of the falling truck to allow us to savor Red's horror as his vehicle plunges to its fiery destruction. (The scenes in the hospital with the dying Gino are very similar to a similar sequence in the very first of the Australian films, Mad Max, in which Mel Gibson visits a dying and severely burned friend -- thus setting up, as in Hell Drivers , the climactic car chase and the gory retribution exacted on the villain.)
Endfield was an American from Scranton, Pennsylvania who made about ten films in Hollywood, most notably The Sound of Fury, a very hard-hitting and effective anti-lynching film. Endfield was blacklisted, wrote a couple more Hollywood pictures and "assistant directed" under a assumed name, but the situation was untenable and he ended up emigrating to Great Britain where he lived until he died. Endfield made several notable pictures in the U.K.including the unforgettable Zulu (also with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine) and the equally memorable (1965) Sands of the Kalahari, also with Stanley Baker. He was a consummate craftsman and excellent director of actors, often unknown players who later became famous. Hell Drivers was Stanley Baker's first major film and Sean Connery has a small role as well.
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