Saturday May 21st | 3 Movies
Director Cy Endfield (Cyril Raker Endfield) is best remembered today not just for being blacklisted after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and then fleeing to England to rebuild his career, but also for his incisive, hard-hitting action dramas and films noirs that subversively explored injustice, corruption and dark undercurrents of American society. Endfield’s pictures brim with cynicism and pessimism, tending to focus on basic survival, as well as on disparate groups of people who are dangerously volatile, capable of brutality, and who find themselves brought together by common enemies.
Three films, from three distinct stages of Endfield’s career, reveal these patterns in varying ways. The Argyle Secrets (1948) teems with corruption and treachery surrounding Nazi collaborators in America; The Underworld Story (1950) conveys an atmosphere of conformity in the residents of a small town that plays into the corruption of the press at the center of the tale; Hell Drivers (1957) explores the savage greed, amorality and desperation that propel the story’s truckers to reckless abandon and violence.
After moving from the east coast to Los Angeles in 1940, Endfield apprenticed at Orson Welles’ Mercury Productions and launched his directing career in 1942 with short subjects at MGM. He directed his first feature, Gentleman Joe Palooka, for poverty-row Monogram Pictures in 1946. His third feature, The Argyle Secrets, was the first on which he applied his own stamp. (He also wrote the screenplay.) The 64-minute B film stars William Gargan as reporter Harry Mitchell, who learns from a fellow journalist of the existence of the Argyle Album, a listing of Nazi sympathizers in America who profited off the war by collaborating with the Germans. When the journalist friend is murdered before he can publish the story, Harry becomes the suspect and a fugitive as he also tries to find the stolen album and expose the traitors—who are of course now after him as well.
The Argyle Secrets is an outstanding little indie noir (recently restored by the Film Noir Foundation) that fittingly was released exactly halfway between The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It is reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon in its story of desperate characters searching for an elusive item, but it also strongly anticipates Kiss Me Deadly in the sense of exhilaration surrounding its suspense and action. As in Kiss Me Deadly, there is danger and the threat of violence emanating from almost every scene. Shot in eight days in January 1948 at a cost of about $112,000, it is full of stylistic touches, striking low-key cinematography by Mack Stengler (including scenes lit by a single lamp), excellent montages and dream sequences, rapid pacing, unexpected and shocking deaths, and highly entertaining hard-boiled dialogue. “The last thing I killed was a pint of bourbon at my best friend’s wake,” cracks Gargan.
Following The Argyle Secrets, Endfield directed an unremarkable B film and then The Underworld Story, an exceptional, long-neglected noir that has gained increased recognition in recent years. Filmed in the late summer of 1949 and released by United Artists in summer 1950, it also centers on a journalist, but this time an unscrupulous one at best. Mike Reese (played by the excellent Dan Duryea) is fired from his city newspaper job after writing a story that prompts the shooting of the district attorney and the murder of a gangster who was about to testify for the prosecution. Borrowing money from underworld figure Carl Durham (Howard Da Silva), Reese relocates to a small New England town where he buys a stake in a local paper owned by Cathy Harris (Gale Storm). When the daughter-in-law of local newspaper magnate (Herbert Marshall) is murdered, Reese proceeds to immorally exploit the story for his own career gain and material profit, even as a Black maid is wrongly accused of the crime.
This scathing indictment of media corruption and a complacent society beat the similar, better-known Ace in the Hole (1951) to theaters by a full year. In The Underworld Story, there is a disturbing feeling that everything is rigged by those with power, and that injustice can all too easily run rampant. Endfield’s masterful visual storytelling, especially his staging of crowd scenes and complex events, suffuses the movie with genuine weight. The dazzling cinematography is by the great Stanley Cortez, who claimed The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) to his credit and would later shoot The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Endfield next made perhaps his greatest and most scathing film, Try and Get Me! (1950), also known as The Sound of Fury, which follows a sympathetic, desperate-for-money husband and father who takes in with a loutish criminal; they commit holdups, then kidnapping and worse, and ultimately find themselves in prison, where a lynch mob threatens to annihilate them by story’s end in one of the most terrifying extended sequences in all of film noir. Soon after completing this picture, Endfield was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, due to his past involvement in left-wing causes and the Communist party. Endfield refused to name names of other suspected Communists, was blacklisted by the film industry, and relocated to England. (Two other members of the Underworld Story production were also blacklisted: actor Howard Da Silva, who didn’t work for a decade, and screenwriter Henry Blankfort, who wound up changing his career to public relations.)
After moving to England, Endfield found work directing for British television as well as a run of B features. He used pseudonyms so as to allow the films’ releases in the United States. His sixth British film, Child in the House (1956), co-starred the rugged British actor Stanley Baker, who went on next to play the protagonist—his first starring part—in Endfield’s Hell Drivers, a gritty classic that deserves to be far better known. Baker’s character is an ex-con named Tom Yately, who wants to make an honest living and takes a job, under an assumed name, hauling gravel for what turns out to be an extremely shady, corrupt trucking company. The roughneck drivers are exploited for extra profits, encouraged to hurtle down roads as fast as their trucks can go with no regard for safety; if a driver misses his daily quota, there’s hell to pay. The result is a ruthless daily competition among the truckers, who take ever more dangerous chances on the road and inevitably resort to foul play.
Baker tries hard to keep to himself and stay out of conflict, but that proves impossible, especially when pitted against the most aggressive and unhinged driver, played by the great Patrick McGoohan (later to star on television’s Danger Man [aka Secret Agent] and The Prisoner). McGoohan is deliciously nasty in Hell Drivers, and his increasingly tense confrontations with Baker are highlights of the film, but the rest of the cast is also superb, full of great British character actors and future stars who bring a raw masculinity to the movie—rare in British cinema at this time. Sean Connery, in just his second credited feature, and Herbert Lom (later Inspector Dreyfus in The Pink Panther films) play truckers, and David McCallum (later the star of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) is on hand as Baker’s brother. Stalwart British character actors William Hartnell, Gordon Jackson, Sidney James and Alfie Bass also appear. Peggy Cummins, the star of the all-time noir classic Gun Crazy (1950), plays the trucking office secretary who flirts with many of these up-and-coming stars and becomes part of a romantic triangle with Baker and the kindly Lom. 20-year-old Jill Ireland also makes one of her earliest appearances as a waitress; she met David McCallum during production and they soon married.
Hell Drivers was shot in beautifully gritty black and white VistaVision by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (later to shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] and Cabaret [1972]). As in Endfield’s other pictures, the action sequences are superbly staged and edited for maximum tension and thrills. The bleakness of the film’s look and locations also conveys a palpable, tough world in which these working-class characters struggle to survive. As Endfield once said, “There is plenty of natural drama in the everyday jobs of men with physical contact with reality... With the survival jobs, the basic jobs, the contact with reality is reduced to simple, basic terms. And that is essentially cinematic.”
Endfield co-wrote the script for Hell Drivers with John Kruse, who drew on his personal experience in driving trucks. Once again Endfield includes a scene lit by a single bulb and builds taut suspense throughout, impressively blending pulpy action scenes with compelling character studies. In the end, the thrilling scenes of the trucks barreling down country roads leave the most vivid impression, conjuring a kinetic breathlessness that is purely cinematic.
The film was restored in 2016 by the British Film Institute at a Pinewood Studios facility using a scanner specially developed for the VistaVision format. The source material was a fine-grain positive print that had been preserved since 1957. A separate print was mined for its sound.
