Highway Dragnet (1954)

• Year: 1954
• Released: 07 Feb 1954
• Country: United States
• Adwords: N/A
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047087/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/highway_dragnet
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, Spanish
• MPA Rating: Passed
• Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
• Runtime: 71 min
• Writer: Herb Meadow, Jerome Odlum, Tom Hubbard
• Director: Nathan Juran
• Cast: Richard Conte, Joan Bennett, Wanda Hendrix
• Keywords: film noir, b movie,

6.3/10

Highway Dragnet Storyline

Jim Henry, a Marine sergeant in the Korean War, has recently been discharged and is in Las Vegas to visit an old army buddy. In a bar, Jim carelessly insults Terry Flynn, a blowzy, blonde gold digger and former fashion model, and she picks a fight with him, but they end up embracing. The next morning, while hitching a ride, Jim is picked up by the Las Vegas police and taken to an apartment where Lt. Joe White Eagle shows him Flynn’s dead body. As Jim was seen fighting with Flynn, White Eagle suspects that he may have strangled her. After Jim says that he was with his army buddy, Paul, who can verify his alibi, he realizes that the soldier was on a classified security mission and therefore was not registered at his hotel under his real name. Despite Jim’s excellent Marine record, White Eagle feels that he has enough evidence against him to hold him. However, Jim resists arrest and seizes one of the police officer’s revolver, holds the police officers at bay and escapes in one of their patrol cars, shooting out the tires on the other.. Driving down Highway 91, Jim turns off the road, abandons the car, changes his clothes and walks back to where he has spotted top magazine photographer Mrs. H. G. Cummings and her model Susan trying to start their disabled car. After Jim fixes the car, the ladies offer him a ride. However, before they can continue, Mrs. Cummings’ small dog runs into the road because she has lost the leash and is killed by a passing car. When they reach the Apple Valley Inn where they have a photographic assignment, Mrs. Cummings and Susan invite Jim to spend some time with them. After the abandoned patrol car is found, White Eagle decides to pursue Jim into California and orders roadblocks set up. At the inn, when a newspaper with a report of the murder and Jim’s photo is delivered to Susan and Mrs. Cummings’ room, Susan wants to call the police, but Mrs. Cummings points out that the murdered woman was the tramp her husband Harold killed himself over and therefore they might suspect her of the murder. Later, after the inn’s publicity is tipped by Mrs. Cummings that Jim is the wanted killer he alerts the police. Jim takes Mrs. Cummings and Susan hostage, steals a car and crashes through a roadblock. With White Eagle and other units in pursuit, Jim manages to lose them by leaving the highway and driving across the desert. However, the car becomes stuck in sand and when Jim attempts to free it, Mrs. Cummings grabs his gun and is about to shoot him when Susan wrestles the weapon away from her, as Susan now believes that Jim may be innocent. Later, Jim tells Susan that he is scheduled to meet Paul, who can confirm his alibi, the next morning at Jim’s partially flooded house at the Salton Sea. When Jim, Mrs. Cummings and Susan reach the house, Jim gets out and tells them to leave, but Susan decides to stay with Jim as she has fallen in love with him. In the house, Jim finds a note from Paul stating that he had to leave on another assignment for the army, thereby depriving Jim of his alibi. Suddenly, White Eagle, who has tracked Jim there, appears, tells Jim that he is under arrest and orders him to put his gun down. Mrs. Cummings enters silently, picks up the gun and, as Susan is about to tell White Eagle about Flynn and Harold, shoots the lieutenant. She then tries to shoot Jim and Susan, but the gun malfunctions and she runs away and falls into what she believes is quicksand. She begs Jim to rescue her, but before doing so, he extracts a confession from her that she strangled Flynn with her dog’s leash. Jim then tells her that she was in no danger as there is no quicksand on his property.The police have overheard her confession and a wounded White Eagle orders that all charges against Jim be dropped. Jim and Susan walk off together, arm in arm.

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Highway Dragnet Movie Reviews

Despite some wasted opportunities, a better-than-most road chase noir

In a Las Vegas casino, just-demobbed Marine (Richard Conte), buying a drink for a case-hardened platinum blonde (Mary Beth Hughes), inadvertently insults her; they have a public spat but kiss and make up, also publicly. Next day he’s picked up by the sheriff as the prime suspect in her death by strangulation. He overpowers his captors and sets out on the lam.

Since an all-points bulletin has troopers checking the highways and the state border, he takes up with a couple of women with car trouble. There’s a high-profile fashion photographer from New york (the redoubtable Joan Bennett, who helped shape the noir cycle in two early Fritz Lang films); with her is her callow young assistant (Wanda Hendrix). Despite their attempts to ditch him, he sticks with them, ultimately by force, on his journey to the California desert, where he grew up.

Highway Dragnet’s title pretty much sums it up: It’s a road-chase movie in the fast, flat 50s style, but with a good pulse and a perverse twist or two (alert viewers will pick up on a giveaway clue right after the dog becomes road kill). It also features the other kind of trouper in the person of Iris Adrian, doing what she did better than anybody else: the hash-slinger with a mouth on her.

But the pedestrian, late-noir style undercuts what might have been the film’s final showpiece: a final reckoning in Conte’s old homestead, under knee-deep water from the floods of the Salton Sea. This strange metaphorical setting gets taken for granted; this was a time when the evocative imagery of earlier film noir had ceded primacy to the literalness of plot.

Fast twisty sometimes nutty sometimes beautiful very low budget escapism

Highway Dragnet (1954)

Wow is this an up and down production. Most of it is rather good, with a handful of supporting actors around the dependable leading role played by Richard Conte. And the plot is solid if a little familiar. Conte, a returned G.I. from Korea, is falsely accused of killing a girl in Las Vegas. And to save himself he has to resort to extreme measures, like escaping from the local cops and more or less kidnapping a couple of attractive women along the way.

One of the highlights is the range of location shooting. Foremost, briefly, is Las Vegas, circa 1954. It will blow your mind. It’s worth watching the first fifteen minutes alone. Then there are lots of desert scenes leading to a grand finale at the Salton Sea, which was famously flooded. This is amazing stuff, buildings have submerged, and a wide open landscape with hardly a car or house.

And the interaction between Conte and the two women is good if somewhat predictable (one of them falls in love with him, the other wants to kill him). There is even the beginning of a photo shoot at a country motel, with a couple of Graflex cameras shown nicely. It all has a curious low budget tension.

But the tension is often resolved or delayed by a sudden bit of luck. Just when Conte is going to get caught, the phone rings, or that kind of thing. And then the ending, which I can’t give away, but ugh. It had huge potential, and was going great overall, until this preposterous scene where a confession is shouted over the waves.

So, take the lumps with the cream here. It’s a short, fast, enjoyable movie overall.

Richard Conte flees the police

Highway Dragnet seems like a B movie, and quite a drop in status for Joan Bennett.

Bennett and Richard Conte are the star, along with Wanda Hendrix.

Unjustly accused of the murder of a woman (Mary Beth Hughes) whom he met in a bar, former marine Jim Henry manages to overpower police and take off. After helping two women, Mrs. Cummings, a photographer, and her model, Susan Wilton (Bennett and Hendrix) with a car problem on the highway, Henry wangles a ride.

He has an alibi, a old friend he was with in Vegas who is supposed to help Jim with a problem at his home the next day. And what a problem – it’s underwater in the Salton Sea.

With his photo on the front page, and cops coming from all directions, it’s not long before Susan and Mrs. Cummings realize who he is – by then, it’s too late. After pulling a gun, he pretends to be Cummings’ assistant. And he pulls more neat tricks to escape the police. The trio end up taking a hazardous drive in the boiling hot desert.

The movie is notable for showing the old Las Vegas and also Graflex cameras, which were fun to see.

Susan’s attraction to Jim after she realizes who he is I found rather odd.

The really odd thing to me was the presence of Bennett, a favorite of director Fritz Lang, the star of many films and a contender for Scarlett O’Hara. Why is it that Harrison Ford at 79 is still playing leads and actresses like Bennett, Merle Oberon, and Lana Turner had to resort to low-budget films?

When it comes to Hollywood, aging in women was fatal back then. It’s better now, but I think there is a way to go.