This ain't no lace pants business.
Jules Dassin's final Hollywood film before fleeing to the (relatively) safer political climes of Europe was 1949's Thieves' Highway, a hard-nosed film noir about the occupational hazards of the wholesale produce business. Richard Conte stars as a returning World War II vet who doesn't like it when he finds out his father has been rooked -- and crippled for life -- by crooked San Francisco wholesaler Lee J. Cobb. Looking to get even, he partners up with grizzled trucker Millard Mitchell, who knows about an early crop of golden delicious apples, and embarks on a treacherous 36-hour drive from Fresco to Frisco. When Conte arrives dead-tired he looks like easy pickings to Cobb, who pays Italian émigré Valentina Cortese (making her American film debut) to get him out of the way while Cobb sells his produce out from under him, but Conte turns the tables, extracting the full price for his load. Of course, Cobb knows more than one way to rob a man blind.
And so does A.I. Bezzerides, who wrote both the novel and screenplay for Thieves' Highway and would go on to adapt Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly for the screen in 1955 (and write 112 episodes of The Big Valley the following decade). As for Dassin, after one further excursion into film noir for Twentieth Century-Fox -- 1950's London-based Night and the City -- he would never again work for an American studio. And after a somewhat rocky start on the continent, he eventually found his feet and made his reputation with films like Rififi, Never on Sunday (for which his future wife, Melina Mercouri, was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars) and Topkapi (which netted Peter Ustinov the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). I've never seen the latter two, but I have designs on catching up with them.