Truckdriving Movies

Chills, thrills, spills, pills...not to mention Detroit on a Friday afternoon, that’s something else...

Truckdriving folklore is so rich in potential excitement that you’d expect truckdriving movies to be as important a genre as westerns. There’s more than enough action, suspense, comedy and conflict in any good truckdriving song to support a whole series of films, let alone one good one. Yet, truckdriving movies have been relatively few and far between; as for good truckdriving movies, well, there was one.

In 1940, director Raoul Walsh shot the all-time classic trucking movie — They Drive By Night. A perfect cast, featuring George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino was a big plus, but the story (about two truckdriving brothers who go up against the crooked bosses), dialogue and atmosphere were equally inspired. Who can forget those funky truckstops, or those longdistance runs through an empty American night? Walsh captured the spirit of the trucking subculture better than anyone before or since: the violent undercurrents, the transcendental boredom, the sense of constant danger just past the bend. It was a romanticized vision, but truckers had always seen themselves as romantic heroes anyway — it went with the territory.