The Long Haul - 1957

Victor Mature and Diana Dors

"I hear you're an honest man. It's a pleasure to meet an honest man. What's your price?" Crooked trucking company boss Joe Easy (Patrick Allan) to Yankee Harry Miller (Victor Mature)

Victor Mature plays Harry Miller, a well-meaning G.I. who exits military service after six years of duty in Germany and is excited to get himself and family back to the USA where he has a nice job waiting in California. His wife Connie (played by Gene Anderson) is from the UK and isn't that interested in the United States (and is maybe not that interested in Harry) and so the two make a compromise to spend the coming months in Great Britain before continuing on to a new life in the sun. Conveniently, her brother back in the UK who works for a trucking company can help Harry get employment during their stay.

We get strong hints from the start that this marriage is strained by fundamental disagreements between the two, and Harry is bending-over-backwards to keep the peace for himself, their son Butch, and to have a peaceful home life. Ironically, once he starts working in the UK, he's not home that much to enjoy it, and is constantly scrambling to learn how long distance trucking jobs are assigned in this new land, trying to be competitive amid the high-pressure of delivering on time, and understanding how much under-handed thievery is involved.

And understanding seems to be the anti-theme of The Long Haul. Just like Harry's marriage, in all the relationships we see on screen, no one quite fully comprehends anyone else, with one exception: Harry completely understands the crooked Joe Easy (played by Patrick Allan) the boss of the trucking company Harry comes to work for on, and then off, the books, and Joe completely understands Harry right back. Both are at odds against each other almost right from their first introduction, and through circumstances involving Joe's brutality toward his girlfriend Lynn (played by Diana Dors), Harry reluctantly rescues her and spirits her away from a humiliating confrontation at a cafe (called "a pig house" by Lynn) where the truckers hang out.

Lynn and Harry are about the only two people in the story willing to stand up to Joe, everyone else fearing his violent temper too much to try, though we do see an unnamed trucker at the cafe deliberately tripping Joe as he tears out after the escaping Lynn after he has publicly ripped open her clothing. Joe then beats the offending trucker unconscious. The defiant Lynn and the unhappily married Harry are natural allies, but this rapidly becomes more complicated because the two stars of The Long Haul start taking long, appreciative looks at one another.

In films about trucking, steering these colossuses of the road isn't easy, and the "inside story" of how trucking is managed isn't so easy either. The Long Haul has a gritty background to it and shows us how smuggling and highway banditry works. Victor Mature's honest Yankee gets put into a place where bending his ethics to keep work coming in to support his family corresponds to his bending toward the thick, full lips of dewy Diana Dors.

When The Long Haul premiered, it was just a month after another gritty, action-packed trucking movie, Hell Drivers, was released. Both films are occupied with madmen steering down the road at breakneck speeds, and an alarming paucity of police enforcement abounds in both.

Each of these films also owe something to the 1953 French Wages of Fear which presents the exact opposite of speeding, rolling juggernauts: truckers carrying nitroglycerin on ragged roads in South America traveling at a snail's pace to avoid blowing themselves up. The Long Haul eventually has more or less the same dilemma when Joe and Harry must pilot a lorry of illegal furs over the Scottish Highlands. They're on their way to meet a coastal smuggler boat and to get paid a fortune, the problem is that the roads they're using are more like suggestions of roads than actual thoroughfares, and the travel slows to a crawl and the two men, forced to hold back from fighting each other by circumstances, start to come unglued.

Highly melodramatic, but very well photographed and featuring good performances by Mature, Dors and Allan, The Long Haul isn't really the equal of Hell Drivers or Wages of Fear, but it is engrossing in it's own way.

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Original Page March 26, 2025