Plot
Saying he has returned from time abroad, Tom Yately seeks work as a truck driver with Hawletts, a haulage company. Mr. Cartley, the depot manager, informs Tom that his drivers convey their ten-ton loads of gravel fast over bad roads. They are expected to deliver a minimum of twelve loads a day; if a driver falls behind, he is fired. Each run is 20 mi (32 km) round-trip; the top driver makes eighteen runs a day. Tom goes on a trial run with the depot mechanic, in truck 13. He narrowly avoids colliding head-on with two other Hawletts trucks speeding the other way.
Cartley hires Tom, and he's assigned truck 13. Tom meets the other drivers, including Irishman Red, the foreman and head driver. Lodging at the same house as various other drivers, Tom is befriended by Gino, an Italian driver who is in love with Lucy, Cartley's secretary. Red offers a £250 gold cigarette case to anyone who can make more runs than him in a day, and Tom is determined to try; however, he soon learns that Red has kept his place at the top by taking a dangerous shortcut that none of the other drivers are willing to risk.
One evening, the drivers go to a dance at a nearby hall and start a fight. When the police are called, Tom flees the scene. Red calls him a coward and, from then on, the other drivers (except Gino) turn on Tom, bullying him incessantly, impeding his runs, and calling him "yellow belly". Despite this, Tom doesn't retaliate.
Tom visits his brother Jimmy and mother in their tobacconist's shop. His mother refuses to accept money from Tom, blaming him for Jimmy's life-changing leg injury that requires him to use crutches.
When the drivers collect their pay packets, Tom realises he's been underpaid. A gleeful Red informs Tom his wages were docked to replace equipment damaged as a result of the drivers' bullying. A fistfight ensues, in which Tom beats Red. Gino offers to switch truck numbers with Tom the next day, so that the others can unwittingly harass Gino and therefore help Tom to win the cigarette case.
That night, Lucy breaks up with Gino. Expressing her feelings for Tom while he performs a vehicle check, Tom confesses that he hadn't actually been abroad but was instead serving a year-long prison sentence. Lucy drops off Tom at the drivers' digs, both unaware that Gino has seen them from his bedroom window.
The next day, Tom purchases a one-way train ticket to London. Lucy rushes into the waiting room and tells him that Gino has been seriously injured in a crash. Distraught, they rush to the hospital. While they wait anxiously outside Gino's room, Lucy tells Tom that Cartley and Red have been scamming money by hiring five fewer drivers than the company pays for and pocketing the difference. They're interrupted by a doctor, who informs them Gino is dying. Gino had switched the truck numbers as arranged, and tells Tom "I threw them off like we planned, for you to win. Crazy. You don't even come." Tom asks him if it was Red who caused his crash, but Gino dies without answering.
Tom returns to the depot and confronts Cartley. He tells him that Gino has died and he knows why, and that he knows about the scam. Cartley offers him a share of the stolen money and Red's place in truck 1. Tom is having none of it, but takes truck 1 to pick up a load. When Red turns up, he forces Cartley to join him in what they think is truck 3 and sets out to silence Tom. Red guesses that Tom will take the dangerous shortcut through the quarry, and they lie in wait there. When Tom appears with his truck full of ballast, Red sideswipes him several times, finally forcing him off the road and onto the edge of the quarry, where the truck dangles precariously, with Tom knocked unconscious. But the brakes on Red's truck, which Red finally realises is Tom's truck 13, fail and he and Cartley drive off the edge and are killed. Tom wakes up and escapes just before his own truck tumbles into the quarry. Lucy, who followed them in a jeep, runs to him.
Actors
Hell Drivers is an early film for several actors who later developed high-profile careers. It provided early appearances for Jill Ireland and David McCallum, who met and married during the film's production. It featured Danger Man and The Prisoner actor Patrick McGoohan, and was the third film role for Sean Connery. William Hartnell was the first actor to play the role of the Doctor in the BBC's Doctor Who; Gordon Jackson appeared as George Cowley in The Professionals and the butler Hudson in ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs. Sid James was a regular supporting actor in British films at the time and appeared in most of the Carry On series. Herbert Lom starred in the ABC Weekend TV series The Human Jungle before playing the hapless Commissioner Dreyfus in The Pink Panther film franchise. Cy Endfield directed Stanley Baker in Zulu. Others including Robin Bailey, Charles Lamb, John Horsley and Wensley Pithey featured regularly in British films and television thereafter. Long-established actor Wilfrid Lawson also made an appearance. In 1966, he co-starred with Patrick McGoohan in the final black-and-white episode of Danger Man, "Not So Jolly Roger".
Production
Filming started 31 December 1956.[3]
The character of Yately comes from Blaenllechau in the Rhondda, near actor Stanley Baker's birthplace of Ferndale.
Footage of a Hawlett's lorry going over the edge of a quarry was reused in "The Heiress" episode of the Rank Organisation television series Interpol Calling.
The vehicles used in the film were the Dodge 100 "Kew" parrot-nosed truck, with tipper body. They were lent for filming by W W Drinkwater of Willesden, North London.[citation needed]
Critical reception
Variety said: "Hell Drivers is a slab of unabashed melodrama. [...] Endfield’s direction is straightforward and conventional, but some of the speed sequences provide some tingling thrills. Acting is adequate, but uninspired. Baker gives a forceful performance of restrained strength and Herbert Lom has some neat moments as his Italian buddy. Patrick McGoohan gives an exaggerated study as the villain."[5]
Time Out wrote: "Energetic and violent trucking thriller marked by the raw, angry edge of the best of blacklist victim Endfield's Hollywood work, and by his appreciation [...] of the markedly out-of-the-mainstream talent of Stanley Baker."[6]
Leslie Halliwell opined: "Absurd, violent, hilarious and constantly surprising melodrama with the silliest of premises backed by a good cast and well-handled thrill sequences".[7]
In British Sound Films David Quinlan wrote that the film was "rough, tough stuff; basically unconvincing perhaps, but still a good thriller".[8]
Reviewing for Empire, Kim Newman said "Hell Drivers is a rare British crime film with the blazing excitement and working-class grit of the best American hardboiled thrillers. [...] Lom overdoes it somewhat as the sentimental Italian obviously doomed to become a plot sacrifice, but the rest of the hairy-knuckled blokes are spot on."[9]
In The New York Times Dave Kehr said the film "achieves an intensity of action and an existential resonance comparable to The Wages of Fear."[10]
The film's theme of the desperate, lorry driving man can be compared to that of The Long Haul (1957).
