Highway Dragnet (1954)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Did you people see the same film I saw?

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

****SPOILERS**** Richard Conte is recently honorably discharged US Marine Jim Henry who's on the run from the police and state troopers, in both Nevada & California, for a murder that he didn't commit. It's this floozy that Jim got friendly in a Vages casino the drunk and abusive Terry Smith, Mary Beth Hughes, who he's suspected of murdering by strangling her with a dog collar. Could the woman have been involved in an S&M session that went horribly wrong? Well anyway with no witness to his being innocent of this horrible crime with his only witness to his innocence being an old Marine buddy working undercover, thus not using his real name, for the government it's no surprise that Jim flew the coop ending up a fugitive from the law.It's while on the run in the Nevada Desert that Jim got hooked up with fashion photographer Mrs. Cummings, Joan Bennett, and her teenage model Susan Willis, Wanda Hendrix, who gave him a lift. Even though Susan was nuts about the handsome ex-marine Mrs. Cummings have reservations about him. And although the entire movie a determined Mrs. Cummings tried to not just turn him over to the police, she knew he was wanted for murder, but do her best to kill him, like in a car accident, herself.It's not until the by now lovers Jim & Susan were tracked down by the police lead by Det. Let. Joe White Eagle, obviously a native American, played Reed Hadley that the whole truth came out in not only Jim's innocence but the reason Mrs. Cummings wanted to shut him up, by murdering him, permanently! The film's ending at Jim's place in his almost underwater home, with a swimming pool in each room, situated on the edge of the Salton Sea has the truth finally come out or surface to who killed the late Terry Smith and the reasons why. It was quite obviously from the start who Terry's murderer was in that all the evidence, from her killer's own mouth, pointed to him or her. As the film went on the killer in knowing that Jim by proving his innocence will expose him he did everything in his power to shut him up by murdering him. This not only tipped off Jim to who he was but also the police including Chief Det. Let. Joe White Eagle who Terry's murderer also tried to do in.

I enjoyed this piece of what my current neighbors would call basura. I mean, it's done by the numbers. It's utterly stupid but exquisitely so.Richard Conte is Jim Henry, just released from the USMC, decorated several times, so we know he's a good guy. He stops for a drink in a Las Vegas bar while hitch-hiking to meet a friend in California. He politely offers to buy a drunk for a frowzy blond sitting on the next stool. She initiates a fracas. The next morning she's found strangled with a strap. The police pin it on Conte and the papers dub him "The Strap Killer." Later, Conte muses, "Sure, I bought her a martini. Sixty-five cents worth of dynamite." (That's the closest we get to poetry.) But Conte escapes, and is reluctantly given a ride through the desert by two women, the professional photographer Joan Bennett and her model, young Wanda Hendrix. The women soon find out who Conte is supposed to be. The viewer with insight or experience will figure out the real murderer at about the half-way point.The police spread a dragnet across points on the highway but Conte eludes them one way or another. You should see him smash through wooden barriers and demolish a couple of parked motorcycles. This is one tough swinging Jim.Acting. Nobody wins the silver star here. Conte snaps out his lines in a brusque and commanding tone. His style, which hardly ever varied, doesn't clash with the character though. Joan Bennett, who was fine elsewhere, is here given a role that turns her into an irritating nuisance. Her New York accent sounds thoroughly specious and swank, with Albian overtones. "After" becomes "Ah-fter." Wanda Hendrix can't act.The story is a kind of mechanical armature around which these three characters (four, if you count the sonorous Reed Hadley, the earnest cop) are molded. It's as if a couple of experienced writers of B features sat down and said, "Let's have the hero trying to escape from the police on a desert highway. How many different narrow escapes can we think of?" They did a good job. The close calls are uncountable. Somebody may look at Conte suspiciously and say, "Hey, didn't I just see your picture in the --", and the phone rings. Or the director cross cuts between police cars with their sirens ululating and Conte frantically trying to get gas at a station in the middle of nowhere. Only the owner is a lazy Mexican who has an old gas pump that is hand operated, and he ever-so-slowly pushes the handle back and forth while chatting amiably about how he and the ancient gas pump are "friends." It's all absurd and fun. Best thing about the movie is the location shooting, which nicely evokes the Mojave desert and, later, the climax at the Salton Sea. Maybe others might not like it as much as I do. It redintegrates memories of being a teen and being cooped up on a Coast Guard cutter that circled for weeks in mid-Pacific. Once in a while, an old movie would be shown at night, and this was one of them. We wept with joy. And Wanda Hendrix, actress or not, looked pretty good.

"Highway Dragnet" is a frustrating film. The actors do a pretty good job and the look of the film is quite nice. It's too bad, then, that the writing was so lousy. In fact, the film is filled with so many logical holes that it resembles cheese! Richard Conte plays a Korean War vet who has just returned home. He's decided to visit Las Vegas and ends up getting into a ton of trouble. That's because after having a loud altercation with a dame in a bar, she ends up dead and all the facts seem to point towards him. So what does he do? Yup, crime film cliché #5--he slugs the cops and disappears!! And, when he hitches a ride out of town, surprise of surprises, one of the ladies driving this car eventually ends up being the real murderer!!! What are the odds?! And, to make it worse, at the end of the film, this murderous woman shoots a detective at point blank range with a .45--and the guy is only SLIGHTLY wounded!!! He SHOULD have had a hole in him large enough to drive through, but miraculously he survives AND hears her make a confession to the original murder!!!! How convenient! Can any of this really happen in the real world? No way! But in this bizarre film, time and again, the impossible seems to occur--making it a very sloppily written movie. It's a shame, as Conte did a good job and he was a fine actor who was simply better than the material they gave him. You can do better than this with your viewing time.

This film is a real treat to watch due to the many absurdities that abound from scene to scene. After a shouting match in a barroom with a buxom over-the-hill blonde ex-model, Richard Conte, finds himself hitch- hiking to the Salton Sea where his house is rapidly disappearing from the rising shoreline! He's picked up by the police, who claim he murdered aforementioned blonde bombshell. Before you can blink an eye Conte's outta there and shooting holes in a classic Kaiser patrol car. He escapes in an old Nash which he abandons upon seeing Joan Bennett(wearing a dress made out of a parachute) and Wanda Hendrix trying to fix a broken-down sedan. He fixes things up while Joan's pooch becomes roadkill. Any 10 year-old has figured out the films outcome at this point. Conte becomes "Mr. Leash", the crazed killer, who gets a whole resort full of vacationers running for their lives. Conte, Joan and Wanda do everything but roast marshmellows over a desert campfire before Joan teaches them both how to do the "Twist" in an improbable puddle of quicksand near Conte's rapidly decaying, drowning dreamhome in the Salton Sea. This movie has a lot of unintentional laughs in it. A great bad movie.