Hell Drivers

Stanley Baker

Cy Endfield's Hell Drivers, from 1957, is a tough minded and exciting black and white British flick about lorry drivers. Stanley Baker stars as Tom, an ex-con who finagles a job with a trucking concern. Under pressure from management and a villainous foreman named Red (Patrick McGoohan), the truckers drive at breakneck speed on their appointed rounds, usually ferrying gravel from a local quarry to construction sites. Tom is befriended by an Italian driver named Gino (Herbert Lom) who has eyes for the trucking firm's bookkeeper, Lucy (Peggy Cummins), but she seems to prefer Tom. This B film is unusually gritty for a British picture of this period, heralding the working class dramas that would be ascendent during the coming "Angry Young Men" era.

Enfield, who co-wrote the script along with John Kruse, was an American who fled to the UK in 1951 because of the Red Scare. His Marxist leanings are evident, though not stressed, in Hell Drivers. We eventually learn that Red is in cahoots with management to keep labor costs down and profits up by maximizing the loads each driver carries while endangering the truckers (and fellow travelers) by urging them to flaunt traffic laws. Capitalism, in Endfield's view, is inherently inhumane because it prioritizes profits over people. Yet, one can enjoy Hell Drivers regardless of one's political orientation because Endfield is such a superb director of action sequences. As with his most commercially successful film, Zulu (also starring Stanley Baker), Enfield demonstrates that he is adept at heightening the impact of his action sequences even when saddled with a limited budget.

The acting of the four principals in Hell Drivers is top-notch, as are the contributions of the supporting cast. Indeed, a number of the supporting players would go on to have significant film and television careers: including Sean Connery, Gordon Jackson, Jill Ireland, and David McCallum. I first saw Hell Drivers some decades ago and was pleased to find how well it held up after a recent viewing. However, I've yet to see a good print of the film. If ever there was a unsung movie that demands to be reissued by the Criterion Collection or another concern in a buffed up condition, it is Hell Drivers.