Hothway Patrol: "Mototrycle B" (Zuv TV, 1957)

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

Because my husband Charles had ended up taking an impromptu nap in the bedroom just before I was ready to run a video, we didn’t have time for a full-length movie (not even a short “B”), so I ran a 25-minute episode of the TV crime show Highway Patrol, “Motorcycle B” from 1957. Highway Patrol was an obvious attempt to do a knock-off of Dragnet, complete with a stentorian narrator (Art Gilmore), though instead of a macho action hero as the lead cop, the series star was bRoderick Crawford, playing Highway Patrol captain Dan Mathews. Gilmore’s stentorian narration explains that because the Highway Patrol cops are so good and their cars can drive at least as fast as those available to crooks, more sensible criminals avoid the freeways as scenes of crimes and it’s left to the more daring and reckless criminals to take on the Highway Patrol. We then meet two gang members who ride motorcycles (which for some reason both cops and crooks refer to as “sickles” for short, a term I’ve heard otherwise only in Arlo Guthrie’s hit novelty “The Motorcycle Song”) and perform armed robberies but with only small payouts. The gimmick is that there are actually three members of the gang, the two who ride the “sickles” and a third member who drives a truck (a flatbed with a canvas top over the back).

The cycle-riding bandits pull over at a predetermined point and drive their bikes into the back of the truck, thereby concealing themselves and fooling the hapless Highway Patrol officers, who naturally are looking for two guys riding motorcycles instead of one guy driving a truck. Only the crooks are undone when a lineman working on a cable right where the crooks are making the switch sees them and reports them to the Highway Patrol – though I was briefly wondering if he was just an accidental witness or a Highway Patrol officer looking out for them by dusguising himself as a lineman. I’ve read enough true-crime stories to know a lot of times criminals are uncovered and ultimately apprehended by just these sorts of accidental witnesses turning up critical information. The crooks hijack a fire truck in the middle of mountain country, breaking through a barricade set up by the fire department to block access to a stretch of forest that represents a major fire hazard,and the Highway Patrol officers shoot through the barricade in an effort to maintain the chase. Ultimately the two sickle-riding crooks are captured after their boss is taken when the fire truck doesn’t respond to a call from its dispatcher. The YouTube upload was oddly glitchy and suffered from some weird bits of apparent mal de mer as the image ricked back and forth from one end of the screen to the other, but the show was harmless fun and surprisingly entertaining.