Up very early this morning both the wife and I due to Illness and when she went back to bed I was left with either a horror film I recorded last night or a 1950’s British film I found on the internet. It was the latter that I decided to watch. I may have seen it before on many occasions but who cares it still was a great film.
Hell Drivers stars Stanley Baker as Tom Yately, a mysterious character who procures a job at Hawlett Trucking Company as a driver. It's an interesting position based on competition and speed. Drivers are paid per-full load delivered (truckload of gravel), a minimum of twelve loads are required a day or the driver is fired.
Speed is the key, the faster you drive the more loads you can carry in a day, the more loads you carry the more money you make, and the person with the most loads receives the prize of a solid gold cigarette case. So if you what to earn braking is an afterthought But to win the gold you have to defeat the leader, the road foreman named Red, who drives truck number 1 and keeps all the other drivers at bay with his 18 loads a day.
Tom takes a couple of goes at breaking Red's record but quickly discovers there's no rules in this competition, anything goes for Red and he'll do whatever it takes to hold onto that record. Tom quickly becomes an outcast among most of the drivers as he seems to shy away from confrontation, it seems to be linked to his rather shady past that's revealed later in the film. But Tom does manage to make friends with one driver named Gino. Gino is optimistic of moving back to Italy and taking his girl Lucy with him.
Lucy is the secretary at Hawlett Trucking, but she's hardly Gino's girl, in fact she's quite attracted to Tom, although Tom shies away from getting involved with the girl his good friend is seeing. However, eventually things begin to spiral out of control as the other drivers begin to make life miserable for him, and Lucy will not stop throwing herself at him.
At first Hell Drivers might not sound like much of a film, speeding around on the back roads of England hauling gravel, but as the film progresses the story begins to evolve into quite an interesting and exciting drama. Other than Sean Connery and Patrick McGoohan (who plays Red), there are plenty of British actors you will remember from films and TV of the time.
Top performances go to the two main characters played by Baker and McGoohan. Baker does a great job playing a rather reserved character with some secrets and McGoohan plays a very convincing arrogant nemesis.
Overall, I found Hell Drivers to be pretty unique, thrilling, and interesting. The film's first and last twenty minutes are by far the best, as the beginning is extremely funny and does a nice job setting up the basis of the story and the conclusion is very dramatic, nicely wrapping up the film with quite a few twists. It's not a perfect film, but it's not too often I watch a seemingly unknown black and white film and love it. In the end, if you can get your hands on this, I recommend checking it out; it's well worth it, especially for fans of this era of cinema.
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