Highway 301 (Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 28) I wanted to watch a couple of movies being shonw in Turner Classic Movies, including a 1950 production called Highway 301 that was the feature on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” time slot even though it’s not really a film noir. Oh, there are scenes in it that look like noir visually – including a great chase scene between heroine and villain that looks like writer-director Andrew Stone had carefully studied Val Lewton’s films and copied his style – but thematically it’s not a film noir at all. It’s about crime, but the good guys are very, very good and the bad guys are very, very bad. Highway 301 was actually inspired by a true story about a group of criminals whom law enforcement named the “Tri-State Gang” because they concentrated their activities in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, along with Washington, D.C. At the time this movie was made, Andrew Stone was a not-so-young man in the make (he was born in 1902 and died in 1999) and he had a wife and producing partner, Virginia Stone (though they divorced in 1971 and she died in 1997 – so Andrew outlived her by two years). They had met at Universal, where he was an up-and-coming director and she was a film editor, and the two formed a professional as well as personal partnership that involved them co-writing their films and sometimes effectively co-directing even though he got sole credit for both those tasks. Stone spent much of the 1940’s trying to get into one of the major studios, and his one success was the all-Black musical Stormy Weather (1943) starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne (and casting them as lovers even though Robioson was old enough to be Horne’s grandfather).

In 1950 Stone sought out Bryan Foy, head of the “B”-picture department at Warner Bros., and sold hm on the idea of making a low-budget crime thriller based on one of the hundreds of true-crime stories on which the Stones had files. Because it was a low-budget film, Andrew Stone was required to update the story from 1934 to 1950 and also shoot it mostly on the Warner Bros. lit instead of going to the actual locations in the Southeast. (Andrew Stone was such a bugbear for authenticity that for his 1960 film The Last Voyage, a disaster movie set on an ocean liner that anticipates The Poseidon Adventure, he actually bought a real ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, shot the film on board and sank it deliberately for his ending.) But he used the real names of the Tri-State gangsters and lucked out in getting Steve Cochran to play the gang’s leader, George Legenza. After no fewer than three wrap-around opening scenes showing the governors of Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina all warning the viewers that crime does not pay (these sorts of prologues were common in movies during the Production Code era to satisfy government agencies, women’s groups and the Production Code Administration and assuage their worries that films like this would glamorize crime and lead people to take it up for real), we meet the gangsters – Legenza, William Phillips (Robert Webber in his film debut), Robert Mays (Wally Cassell), Herbie Brooks (Richard Egan), and Noyes Hilton (Edward Norris).

We also meet the gangsters’ women, who are by far the most multidimensional characters in the film: Madeline Welton (Aline Towne), whom Legenza offs early on after she threatens to rat out the gang; Mary Simms (Virginia Grey), a hard-boiled noir dame who’s not only aware that she’s traveling with a bunch of criminals but is fully on board with their activities; and Lee Fontaine (French actress Gaby André, whom Warners had brought over during a brief vogue for French actresses in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s), a French-Canadian women who married one of the gang members in the belief that he was a legitimate dealer in jewelry and furs. When she finally realized that the only jewelry and furs he’d ever handled had been stolen from their rightful owners, she got antsy and threatened to leave. After the three state governors have had their say, Highway 301 begins with a spectacular bank robbery scene in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in which the crooks escape capture by ditching the stolen car they used as their getaway vehicle and continuing in their own car, which they had stashed in an old barn. After their money runs out (surprisingly this film does not make the point other gangster movies made to establish their anti-crime credentials by showing how little of the stolen money the gangsters actually get to keep once fences and other underworld bottom-feeders have taken their cuts), the gang plots the traditional “one big score” they hope will provide them enough money to live on easy street for the rest of their lives.

Alas, though they hijack a shipment that’s supposed to contain $2 million (and Legenza kills the truck driver who’s in charge of the dough), it turns out to be “cut” – i.e., shredded and therefore useless. Legenza gets his revenge by killing the heavy-set man who gave them the tip on that shipment in the first place. Lee Fontaine’s husband is killed in a shootout with the police, and she realizes that without him to protect her it’s only a matter of time before Legenza either rapes her, kills her or both. She tries to escape in the Lewtonesque scene I mentioned earlier, but gets ambushed by Legenza when he substitutes himself for the driver of the cab she hailed. Alas for the crooks, though, Legenza’s shot just severely wounds her and renders her comatose but not dead. The finale takes place in the hospital, where the police, led by Washington, D.C. Detective Sergeant Truscott (Edmon Ryan), by far the savviest cop in this film, are waiting for her to come to so they can question her.

Anxious to finish the job of silencing Lee,Legenza sends Mary Simms into the hospital to find out where Lee is being treated. To do this, she adopts the identity of reporter “Mary Graham” and says she’s a leg person for a columnist at the Washington Star – only Truscott calls the paper and finds out she doesn’t work there.The climax is a shootout in the hospital in which three of the four remaining gangsters are killed and the fourth is arrested. Highway 301 would have been a much better movie – and closer to classic noir – if it had focused more on the women and their moral dilemmas (and we’ve already grown to like Lee Fontaine so mucy we’re relieved to see her alive, weill and on her way back to Canada at the end), but as it is it’s a tough, no-nonsense thriller even with its all-bad gangsters and all-good cops, and Steve Cochrain’s peculiar intensity really makes this movie.