Summer Noir: THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940)
Raoul Walsh’s superb noir THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940) captures the rolling California countryside amidst a frantic trucker schedule. Offscreen gangster affiliate George Raft & genuine pal Humphrey Bogart star as the Fabrini Brothers, freelance long-haul truck drivers pushing themselves beyond the brink of exhaustion with mounting debts & tight schedules.
This Warner Brothers film is stolen by the female leads: Ann Sheridan, a cynical waitress joining the duo, & Ida Lupino, the sharp-elbowed furious femme fatale. There is camaraderie amongst the long-distance truckers, a tragic point when accidents occur on hairpin turns. Men attempt to escape from burning wreckages in a film moving on pure kinetic transport: everyone is harried, behind schedule if not occasionally distracted by pinball (specifically the character “Irish” by Roscoe Karns, a welcome slapstick addition to the somber twists). I particularly enjoyed the roadside diner sequences, Ann Sheridan pointedly snapping at Bogart “enough with the X-ray treatment.” Interestingly, this was one of 6 films Sheridan & Bogart made together. The script was discovered by former Ziegfeld girl Gladys Glad, wife of producer Mark Hellinger. Hellinger brought home a stack of scripts & when Glad suggested THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, Hellinger dismissed the film since “nobody would pay money to see a bunch of truck drivers.” Glad insisted, Hellinger read the script & greenlit the production — which was a huge box office hit.
George Raft (at one time a real rum-dinner) & Humphrey Bogart (who would become a star after 1941’s HIGH SIERRA, recommended for the role by Raft & together once more with Lupino, who did not get along Bogart) are associated as a duo in novel ways: both pop up in “There Goes a Tenner”, the 1982 Kate Bush single. The film is famously bifurcated: there’s the sleep-deprived road life & then Lupino’s mad descent into murderous jealousy. Any classic Hollywood fan will appreciate this innuendo-laden, witty yet tragic Raoul Walsh road noir.
