THE ROAD TO 'FRISCO
(Warner Bros.)
THINK I suggested once before in this page that there were dramatic possibilities in the lives of the men who drive the transport trucks along the high-
ways of the U.S. The men who, you may remember, roared past the creeping jalopies of the Joads and the Wilsons on their trek to the West in the Grapes of Wrath. Men whose lives, bounded by cab windows and hag-ridden by time-schedules, John Steinbeck found important enough to fill many of his pages. Well, after I had watched The Road to ’Frisco for fifteen minutes, I thought Warners had tapped this new wellspring. Here was realism, and real realism at that, not the spoof variety which Hollywood dishes out all too often. George Raft and Humphrey Bogart were truck-drivers such as Steinbeck described, fighting to hold their places on the road as owner-drivers, and fighting to keep up the instalments on their (Continued on next page)
(Continued from previous page) trucks so that they could be de facto as well as de jure owner-drivers-always straining every nerve to keep ahead of rival drivers and the finance companies. Thus far the film was good. Warners have a credible crowd of extras, George Raft is engagingly tough, Humphrey Bogart-for once an honest citizen, if a sleepy one-is equally good though relatively non-belligerent. There is a firstclass fight which should satisfy the most exacting critic of strong-arm tactics and a couple of nerve-racking truck crashes. But when, not quite halfway through, the film gets off the road it gets off the rails too. As long as it was a film about truck-drivers and their own particular struggle for existence it was good and, to ‘a great extent, it broke new ground. But, unfortunately, Bogart crashed his and Raft’s truck. He lost an arm and Raft left the road to take a white-collar job and from then on the film slides rapidly down from the highroad of realism into the morass of melodrama. Mind you, as melodrama, it’s quite good melodrama, but tacked on to such a fine beginning it seems trashy stuff and aj} more than twice-told tale, with the Eternal Triangle eternally jangling in the background, What I imagine was intended as the climax of the film-a courtroom scene in which Ida Lupino has hysterics and confesses to murderseems very flat in comparison with one or two scenes from the earlier part of the film. As I have said, George Raft and Humphrey Bogart are good, and so is Alan Hale as Ida Lupino’s infatuated husband. The redoubtable Miss Sheridan, much to my disappointment, appeared to have slimmed (or sloughed) ‘off most of her oomph and as for Ida Lupino, .she looked positively twodimensional. The first half was really worth a clap but the second definitely spoiled the average. Still, we sat up and were interested for, after all, it was an interesting experiment, and maybe Warners will do better next time.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 99, 16 May 1941, Page 16
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494THE ROAD TO 'FRISCO New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 99, 16 May 1941, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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