Road rage… Hell Drivers (1957)

I haven’t seen this film since a black and white Saturday in the seventies and it deserves its reputation as one of the best dramas of the period. Yes, the film is sped up to make some of the truck driving look even more dangerous than it probably was but on the bigger modern screen this is still a white knuckle ride as your foot reflexively pushes down hard on the imaginary brake at the base of your living room chair with every manic swing round an impossible corner or reckless overtake into on-coming traffic. 

Cy Endfield’s cutting is masterful of course and the editing of John D. Guthridge, pulling back and forth from the road, the monstrous trucks and the sweated reactions of one of the finest ensembles of actors you’ll find. Indeed, it’s not so much the speed of vehicles that scare you but the display of desperation and mad determination on the brows of Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan and Herbert Lom. This is Britain’s answer to Clouzot’s Wages of Fear with the dynamite being in men’s hearts and minds, post-war austerity of the soul.

Stanley Baker

 

Baker is brilliant as Tom Yately, just out of prison for an unspecified crime but aiming to follow the straight and narrow if he can only get a chance. He has the right mix of quite shame in his past with a modest, yet fierce belief in his own worth; such a likeable actor and one of the icons of post-War British cinema. None of the characters in Hell Drivers is entirely innocent and it’s a tough film with a dark heart. Tom finds his way to Hawletts, a haulage contractor ruthlessly run by Mr Cartley (William Hartnell), which makes money by moving as much gravel across from quarry to building site as possible with the mathematics of the daily deliveries being unrelenting: each driver needs to make at least twelve ten-ton, twenty-mile round trips a day or lose his job. The trucks are parrot-nosed Dodge 100 "Kew" vehicles not designed for comfort or even safety at the speeds the top drivers take them. 

Cartley's secretary Lucy (Prestatyn’s finest Peggy Cummins in jeans!) has an instant spark with Joe who’s heard from a pal about a vacancy – caused, as we learn, by the death of a driver – and he soon learns the ropes after a near miss on his first trip out in truck no. 13, with head mechanic Ed (the excellent Wilfrid Lawson). It doesn’t get any easier as Joe soon comes up against the driver’s top dog, "Red" Redman (Patrick McGoohan), the fastest and most reckless who has truck no. 1. McGoohan has screen presence to match Baker’s and is at his most febrile here, as out of control as the Dodge’s with a performance that veers towards the barrier of believability but stays just inside the double yellow line of sincerity.

Peggy Cummins

Herbert Lom’s Gino, driver of truck no. 3, provides a counterbalance, an Italian who remained after the war and who is both religious and honest. Gino loves Lucy, and sweetly calls her his “girl” even though we suspect she is only marking time with him as she soon proves with her advances to Tom; see, no-one is innocent.

The rest of the team is a roll-call of character-acting excellence, everyone of whom would have long careers; Dusty, no. 22 (Sid James), Tinker, truck 11 (Alfie Bass), Scottie, no. 7 (Gordon Jackson) and, sorry mate but the Scottie nickname was already taken, Johnny, no. 19 (someone called Sean Connery). We also have the stunningly stunning Jill Ireland as a waitress in the Pull Inn café where the boys congregate for breakfast and after a hard day’s truck. 

Tom soon gets with the flow and sets himself the target of beating Red’s record and winning the gold cigarette case for anyone who can better his 18 runs in a day. But the game is rigged as Red cheats by cutting across country and does everything he can to hamper the competition by fair means or foul. This is a tough film and you know not everyone will make it through…

What a carry on Mr Bond?

Tom goes to see his mother (Beatrice Varley) and brother Jimmy (David McCallum) to give them some of his hard-earned cash, but he’s still in disgrace with her not just for his crime but the fact he involved Jimmy who is now permanently on crutches as a result. It leaves you thinking what would have made the otherwise decent Tom so desperate for money that he’d risk both her sons in the crime. There’s something in this film that touches on working class choices and also exploitation as Hawletts turns out to be a crooked enterprise, with Cartley and Red colluding to cream off the pay for more drivers than they actually employ. They’re driving the men into the ground to make up for the missing headcount. 

The mood changes after a scrap at the local dance when Tom, wary of breaking his parole, makes a getaway before ethe police arrive to settle matters. The other drivers now start to call him coward and to undermine him at every turn, encouraged by Red. Gino swaps trucks with Tom to give him a chance at the record and pays the price… things are getting personal and Tom determines to risk everything to prove himself and to expose the con.

Parrot-nosed Dodge 100 "Kew" trucks

Dusty verdict: Hell Drivers is a classic late-period Brit Noir that manages to entertain whilst making you feel uneasy throughout. Even the lead character has been driven to such extremes that his brother is crippled and his mother won’t forgive him, whilst the rest, even those such as Sid and Alfie, are happy to join in with Tom’s victimisation, following Red’s miss directions.  

All of which gives the film the winning edge of a reality that remains, survival of the fittest against all the odds of a rigged system.  

It’s available on BFI Blu-ray with ten ton of extras and frankly, I wouldn’t hesitate to snap it up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bucolic Bardot… Dulcima (1971), Carol White

This is a deceptively simple film which features one of Carol White’s finest performances alongside the great John Mills. The interplay between the two is exceptional and showed that the “Battersea Bardot” could not only hold her own with the very best, acting and reacting with the natural emoting seen in her Loach films, but also that she could place herself in different contexts. This is not the kitchen sink of the city but the barn door of Gloucestershire countryside and she fits right in, hair a natural brown, pitch perfect accent and freckles revealed in her un-made-up face.

 Based on a novella from HE Bates – author of The Darling Buds of May, The Triple Echo and Love for Lydia – the story is a typical rural affair, transposed from his usual stamping ground of Northamptonshire to Gloucestershire, with filming taking place around Minchinhampton and Tetbury.  

Fresh from his best supporting Oscar for Ryan’s Daughter (1970), the 62-year old Mills looks fit as a fiddle as Farmer Parker, devoid of rustic charm and a penny-pinching drunk given to cheating his competition of fair prices at the market and stashing his cash under carpets, in biscuit tins and under his hat. He’s a selfish old get who starts the film after a long lunchtime session by driving his Land Rover all too close to Dulcima Gaskain (Carol) as she pushes her baby brother in a pram. He ends up crashing into his chicken coop and Dulcima rushes to help, as he falls out onto the mood in a stupor.

Sir John

Dulcima “Dulce” Gaskain is the eldest of countless siblings and is a drudge for her parents, driven especially hard by her father (Bernard Lee), who expects her to look after him at the expense of her own happiness. After a hard day’s mopping, shopping and cooking, she lies in bed reading of a better life, looking dreamily at the latest fashions and alighting with a smile on an advert showing a handsome young man advertising the knitwear brand Albert.

Seeing Parker’s chaotic existence, she sees an opportunity to make some money by helping to clean his house and generally making herself useful. At first, he doesn’t quite see it, especially when sitting room is transformed as Dulce clears his clutter and washes his threadbare curtains but a hot meal soon persuades him that perhaps he can take advantage of this young woman.

Both of them have ulterior motives and when Dulce accompanies Parker to the cattle market, we see how the wily old sod deliberately takes out a competing farmer by saying he’ll buy his cows so that he can get a better price for his own cattle. He doesn’t follow through with his offer and perhaps this gives Dulce the signal that he deserves a little of his own medicine.

Dulce distracts

Dulce then deploys a different approach by driving Parker to distraction with a few buttons lowered on her top and some earthy leaning and bending as she cleans the floors. If he was happy with her food and cleaning, he’s delighted to see more of her and all the while Dulce keeps a tally of how much he owes her. Getting actually paid the old man requires a greater level of commitment though and Dulce finally gets what she wants by giving him what he’s obviously not had for some time… poor fellow is so distracted he even gives her more than she asked for although she later tells him he overpaid her; it’s a canny game between the two.

All the while Dulce has been warding Parker off with talk of her jealous boyfriend, Albert – inspired by the advert – but she gets a start when one day the man from the advert turns – as the Forest Warden from the neighbouring estate (Stuart Wilson). From this point on she keeps on bumping into the younger man and Parker, who keeps on seeing him from a distance, becomes increasingly uncertain. 

Love is blind though and Dulce moves in to be rewarded with a higher salary and a TV set. The point has been reached were the balance in the couple’s strange relationship has been tipped in Dulce’s favour and when she gets dolled up and flirts with “Albert” on the bus, she arranges a date with him. It’s quite the transformation for White as the “dolly bird” of the sixties emerges in full bloom and it’s clear Parker is out of his depth and age group.

Carol White and Stuart Wilson

Now this amiable tale changes tone as there’s nowhere for Albert’s love to go as Dulce becomes increasingly attached to Albert and yet the resolution is not going to be a clear one: will Dulce take responsibility for where she has led the old man, will he realise that his pursuit of her is hopeless?

Dusty Verdict: Frank Nesbitt directs with a lightness of touch that frees the two main players to interact in funny and convincing ways. White’s Dulcima does not come across as cynically as she might and there’s a genuine win-win for both Dulce and Parker until life intervenes.

Mills is as good as you expect with some delightful expressiveness and he’s truly convincing as the dirty old farmer from the days when baths were less frequent and the four-wheel drives were often battered and purely functional. White responds so well and is perfectly at home in the country showing the comic touch to make light of Dulce’s duplicity as well as the dramatic flair we all know she has.

Dulcima is available on Blu-ray now so there’s no excuseto miss this one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No one was saved? Made (1972)

Anyone in any doubt about the stunning consistency and sheer ability of Carol White need look no further than this overlooked yet viscerally affecting film. Until this 2k restoration and release on DVD from Network, Made had been little seen since its original theatrical release and subsequent mixed reviews with the Time Out review from Geoff Andrew noting “moments of acute perception” but also accusing it of “a typically British glamorisation of seedy lives…”; it’s hard not to agree with the former and to completely disagree with the latter. There’s a Loachian reality to the film, a freshness to the, partly improvised playing and these lives are recognisably un-glamorised and far from seedy.

The person holding this all together is Carol White and performance is very much in the style of her films made with Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home and Poor Cow. In his superb essay in the 28 page booklet accompanying the DVD, film historian Neil Sinyard quotes White in saying she found the part exhausting because she identified so much with her character Valerie, “Nothing goes right… it’s just not fair.” Sinyard’s booklet is one of the best you’ll find and adds so much context to the film and I apologise for any snippets I’ve lifted*! He is right to describe White as luminous as Valerie and, as she is in virtually every scene, she carries the whole enterprise on her shoulders with a vital grace and balance that brings the best out of even the untrained but charismatic Roy Harper.

Carol White

In White’s eyes Valerie’s trials are all too believable, there’s an intelligence and vulnerability as well as a working-class resilience that leaves you hope even with a scenario every bit as brutal as a Zola novel. Most things, as Carol said, “go wrong” for our Val, but she faces up to it all and, unlike Howard Barker’s play, No One Was Saved (1970), you can believe, as with Giulietta Masina’s character in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), that she may yet prevail. Part of the reason for this is that Valerie is not the source of her bad luck, that is very much the men in her life and others too; at the end of the day, she’s too strong to be undermined by their attempts to control and to use her. Down but not out in London and Brighton…

Barker’s play was partially a reaction to The Beatle’s Eleanor Rigby in which he saw a rare concern with despair and defeat from a group he wasn’t always convinced by, especially Lennon. In this case the song was McCartney’s and all the more remarkable for that given his supposed fondness for the sweet stuff... Barker’s screenplay for Made was, written in collaboration with the producer, Joseph Janni, and director John Mackenzie, no relation to Father Mackenzie obviously, who had directed the excellent Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971) and would go on to give us The Long Good Friday (1980).

Title sequence showing priest, mother and musician: the forces shaping Valerie's life

The film has cracking opening credits, shot in shadowy black and white with White’s character and Ray (Richard Vanstone) looking up to the night sky as they play on a roundabout in a children’s playground. Other characters are featured in this inspired entre and it sets the mood of dislocation and loneliness from the get-go as well as kicking off the narrative as soon after Valerie gives Ray the knock back when he expects more of her in the back of his van; he calls her frigid and all the usual seventies expressions of frustrations at women who don’t go “all the way” (back to The Beatles and John’s original lyric of “she’s a pr*ck teaser…” for Day Tripper).

Valerie is a single mother working as a switchboard operator in London with her best mate, June (Doremy Vernon) who is altogether more relaxed in her attitude to relationships, she even agrees to go out with Ray later in the film. In the office one of the managers, Mahdav (Sam Dastor) has a crush on Valerie but she doesn’t see him as serious or authentic enough. Mahdav puts Valerie on a pedestal and will even write poetry for her…

Roy Harper's minstrel in America

Valerie is a doting mother to her baby son whilst her own mother, played by the excellent Margery Mason, has MS and wants more attention from her girl than is healthy. Mackenzie doesn’t necessarily judge but observes and there’s tragedy in this relationship as the mother cries wolf and the daughter just wants some joy.

Valerie is a member of a youth club run by Father Dyson, John Castle, who is always so good in conveying artifice and the disconnects between sincerity and anterior motivations, he likes Valerie and yet he also likes her too. The group travel down to Brighton for a day out and whilst he stands up for their misbehaviour, asking for understanding, he is quite judgemental himself and when it comes to Valerie, he thinks he knows best, couching his guidance in terms that seem to support her need for freedom and yet which leave us in no doubt as to his desire to possess.

Getting noticed at work with Doremy Vernon

Part of the group is a girl called Ann played by the excellent Sara Clee, it’s only a bit part but she is always a good addition to any film!

In Brighton Valerie wanders on her own and comes across a young Bob Harris interviewing folk-pop wonderkid Mike Preston (Roy Harper). Whispering Bob does rather well with his twiddling pen and questioning as does Mr Harper – hats off to both! I wonder how much of this section was scripted or whether they were both given free reign to elaborate on familiar themes. Roy Harper is one of our great lyricists and over a fifty-year career has written some classics, especially When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease and Twelve Hours of Sunset, yet he is not known for his acting. Mike Preston is Roy’s only role and he does a decent enough job as Mike/Roy, responding well to the performers around him. 

Bob interviews Roy

Mike and Valerie begin a relationship and there are some good exchanges as the anti-establishment creed of the folk singer chimes with the young mother’s desire to be accepted as an equal yet Valerie doesn’t agree with Mike’s ideas of free love and she still carries the idea of a long-lasting monogamous commitment. Harper’s instinctive playing also goes well against his ostensible rival, Father Dyson, contrasting with John Castle’s more layered and controlled style.

As events unfold, Mother deteriorates and horrible tragedy intervenes, the worth of Valerie’s suitors is to be fully revealed and, it seems, her only chance is to “make” herself for herself and not to be made in their image. 

John Castle and Carol White

Dusty Verdict: Made is a flawed and fascinating film that deserves to be more widely seen. The Network DVD is out of print now – which is especially a shame for Sinyard’s notes – but you can stream it on Amazon Prime and copies are available on eBay: don’t hesitate!

It’s a really strong performance from Carol White who develops on her previous roles with very strong improvisations that, for me, place her high in the British actors of this era; she was called the Battersea Bardot, but she’s far more of a metropolitan Jeanne Moreau. She conveys natural emotion through the believable veneer of everyday emotion and always draws the eye and sympathy, a true star.

*Neil Sinyard is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Hull and has published over twenty books on film, he also has a wonderful blog, Sinyard on Film.

 

 

 

 

 

Sara Clee, second row, on the right!