⭐️⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 26

• This was only Sean Connery’s second credited film role, and its a minor but distinctive one. Five years after this film, he would be the first and most memorable James Bond.
• Stanley Baker, who played the lead role of Tom, also found worldwide fame a few years later with 1961’s The Guns of Navaronne.
• William Hartnell, who plays the truck company manager Cartley awfully smartly, would be the original “Doctor Who” six years later.
• Patrick McGoohan, well known for “The Prisoner” and many film roles now, was one of the leads in this film. Again, just six years later, he would star in Dr.Syn, or The Scarecrow.
• David McCallum had an early part as Tom’s handicapped brother and the reason he went to jail, and was a well-established film actor by this point, but seven years later he would co-star in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” on US TV and become a household name with a long (and continuing) illustrious career.
• Jill Ireland is unrecognizable as the waitress at the Pull In Diner. She married McCallum as a result of them meeting on this film, divorced him 10 years later, and famously married Charles Bronson a year after that following her meeting him on a film he and McCallum worked on together (The Great Escape).
• Marianne Stone was never a huge star, but holds a Guinness Book of World Records title for “Actress with the Most (Film) Screen Credits,” with over 200 movies on her resume.
• John Kruse, who wrote the original short story, went on to write for “The Avengers” and more famously “The Saint,” among other shows of that genre.
• Cy Endfield was forced to relocate his career to the UK thanks to the McCarthy hearings in the early 50s, but was nominated for a BAFTA for Hell Drivers and went on to later acclaim for exotic war movies like Zulu (1964).

The rest of the cast also contains many other names familiar to 1950s and 60s UK film fans. Nearly everyone who had a speaking part in this film (not to mention a couple of the background artists) can also be found in literally dozens of other movies.

But anyway, what about this movie? It’s a well-shot and well-directed tale of a shady trucking company that hires a motley set of drifters, hobos, and ex-cons as ballast haulers who must drive big trucks like crazy people in order to meet the nearly-impossible schedule set out by the management. Ruggedly handsome ex-con Tom Yately (Baker), in desperate need of a job, gets drawn in to this rabbit hole and decides to take on the borderline-psychotic Red (McGoohan), befriends the only decent person among the drivers, Gino (Lom), and attracts the ladies with his rugged good looks and reluctance to share too much information (Cummings and Ireland).

As the title suggests, Hell Drivers is a very macho film with a whole crew of manly men who do man things, mannishly. The work is hard and dangerous, and the company knows full well that anyone they lose to an accident or death is easily replaced.

The drivers are attracted by the good money, but responsible for the cost of any mechanical faults, accidents, speeding tickets (which oddly never happens to any of them in the course of the film), or absences. As mentioned, in order to meet even bare-minimum 12-run quota they pretty much have to drive like maniacs, and attract much honking of horns and a load of near-misses. Red, the “pace setter” does 18 runs a day and holds a solid-gold cigarette case as a prize for anyone brave enough to beat him.

The film isn’t all crazy truck-racing sequences shot on overcranked film, though, and the story is nicely balanced between the job and what the drivers do off the job, which is mostly limited to eating at the Pull In Diner, sleeping in their rented rooms at a boarding house, and occasionally disrupting the local church social. We also spend quality time with Tom and Gino getting to know each other, the love triangle that ensues with Peggy, and Tom’s increasingly-hostile social time with Red and the other drivers.

Matters of the heart and of the fists as well as of the reckless driving come to a simultaneous head in the lead up to the climax and subsequent denouement, executed even better than I expected from such a workmanlike film. While Baker gruffs his way through most of the film, there is a surprising off-shoot of the plot where he returns home to his family, only to be cruelly rejected by his own mother.

While the entire backstory of that scene is never fully explained, we gather that the reason Tom is an ex-con is that he served a year in jail for reckless driving, which resulted in the crippling of his young brother Jimmy (McCallum). Beatrice Varley as Tom’s mother is pure, unforgiving ice water, with a perfect delivery of a chilling line: “For you it was a year, for me and Jimmy it is a life sentence!”

Speaking of that, the film does have its moments of sparkling dialogue, and the friendship between Gino and Tom is a touching and multi-layered sub-plot with some nice twists. I don’t think it will be giving anything away by saying that of course one of the drivers dies in the film, but there’s a nice twist even in that.

I should also mention the solid music score by Hubert Clifford, which comes to prominance in the racing sequences and is far more subtle elsewhere. Jim Groom as sound designer offers some nice touches with notes of nature sounds amongst all the engine noise. If you’ve seen the 1953 film The Wages of Fear, this has a similarly macho character-driven story of desperate men driving, but the two are distinctly different nonetheless.

So, in the end, it worth a watch? If you like gritty realism in your late-50s domestic-drama UK films, this one will likely win you over. The overcranked speed shots of the trucks get annoying, but there is still some genuinely hair-raising moments in them, and just seeing McGoohan at his most unhinged, along with a jokey yet already distinct Sean Connery and a young David McCallum (among others), is just as entertaining as the story.