Highway 13 (Lippert Pictures, Screen Guild Productions, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ultimately Charles and I watched another movie last night, an hour-long “B” gangster pic from Lippert Pictures in 1948 called Highway 13. It starts with a long montage of trucking accidents, which I’m presuming came from whatever stock shots of trucks losing control and crashing as Lippert’s stock-footage library contained. As I joked to my husband Charles as I started running the film, it starred Batman – or at least Robert Lowery, who’d played Batman in the second Columbia serial, Batman and Robin (1948). Here Lowery is Hank Wilson, who drives for a long-haul trucking company called “N-E” (“Norris Express”), and when he isn’t working hangs out at a local garage and coffee shop run by Bill “Pops” Lacy (Clem Bevan in what at first appears to be the sort of cornball comic-relief character Walter Brennan specialized in). There are two reasons he goes there: Lacy services his company’s trucks and Hank is romancing the main waitress there, Pops’ granddaughter Doris Lacy (Pamela Blake, who turns in a serviceable but unspectacular performance that drags down the film a bit, albeit in a nothing role). Norris Express’s CEO, J. E. Norris (Tom Chatterton), decides to bring in a private detective, George Montgomery (Gaylord Pendleton, later known as Steve Pendleton), to investigate the crashes of his company’s trucks as well as a private car driven by his daughter, Henrietta Denton, which went out of control on a deserted road. Henrietta’s husband, company executive Frank Denton (Michael Whalen), briefs Montgomery (whose name must have jarred late-1940’s moviegoers since there was a real actor named George Montgomery, who’s probably best remembered for having been briefly married to Dinah Shore and turning in a wretched performance as Philip Marlowe in 1947’s The Brasher Doubloon) on the situation and pairs him with Hank Wilson on the next truck run.

Only Montgomery is killed in an accident in the yard after a truck’s handbrake mysteriously detaches, causing it to roll backwards and crush the undercover private eye. Hank distinctly recalls that he set the handbrake on that truck properly and realizes he’s being framed for the sabotage, so he determines to get to the bottom of it. Part of his strategy is to romance the company’s executive secretary, Mary Hadley (Maris Wrixon, who turns in a quite nice femme fatale performance), though this leads to a jealous hissy-fit from Doris Lacy, who releases Hank from his marriage proposal and tries to give him back his engagement ring. Fortunately, he doesn’t take it back and she keeps it. Highway 13 was directed by William Berke, who had a rather quirky career; he began in independent films in L.A., mostly “B” Westerns which he produced himself. Berke got a contract with RKO and directed some of the later films in “The Falcon” series, then (like a lot of “B” directors who hadn’t cracked the “A”-list) ended up in television, though just before he died he’d returned to the world of independent filmmaking and made movies of the first two 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, Cop Hater and The Mugger. (Cop Hater featured an early performance by Jerry Orbach as a juvenile delinquent, decades before he played a cop himself on Dick Wolf’s TV franchise Law and Order.) The script was nothing special – the original story was by John Wilste and the screenplay by Maurice Tombragel, and there’s a reason you’ve never heard of these writers before – but Highway 13 delivers the goods effectively and becomes a quite good if unambitious crime thriller with overtones of film noir. We’re kept in legitimate suspense as to just who the guilty parties are; among the subplots is the mid-film revelation that that seemingly nice old comic-relief character, “Pops” Lacy, actually was a gangster in Chicago in the 1920’s, and there’s an unexpected scene in which his wife Myrt (Mary Gordon) throws a pie in his face with the aplomb of a 1920’s slapstick comedian.

Eventually just about everyone in the cast is part of the plot – Hank and Doris are the only ones who aren’t. The sabotage and accidents are part of a scheme hatched by Frank Denton, who was going extra-relational on his wife with Mary Hadley and killed her by messing around with his car. His motives were to drive the stock price of Norris Express down so he and Mary could buy out the company and acquire it on the cheap, and “Pops” did the actual sabotage while Myrt tried to stop him. (It’s not clear just how much involvement Myrt had with the saboteurs.) Ultimately “Pops” tries to kill Hank by putting him into a truck that’s been monkeyed around with and setting it off while he’s under the influence of a drug “Pops” has slipped him in his coffee – only Doris has hidden herself in the cargo compartment and manages to break through the glass window separating it from the driver’s cab. She grabs hold of the steering wheel and keeps the truck from crashing until enough of the drug has worn off that Hank is capable of driving again, and Frank and Mary are killed when their own car crashes and takes a tumble off a mountain road. Highway 13 is an O.K. crime thriller and Berke’s direction, though not a patch on what he achieved either with major-studio backing in his “Falcon” films or at the end of his career (and his life; he died in 1958 at age 54) with Cop Hater and The Mugger, is capable and sometimes more than that, especially in the performance he got out of Maris Wrixon. Her career is one of the most curious Hollywood might-have-beens: she started out in independent “B”’s and then got a contract at Warner Bros., where she starred in Spy Ship, a “B” remake of the 1934 Fog Over Frisco in which she played Margaret Lindsay’s role in a script remodeled to base the character of her sister (Irene Manning in a role played in Fog Over Frisco by Bette Davis!) on real-life aviatrix and Nazi sympathizer Laura Ingalls. Then, alas, her career faded out, she got dropped and returned to the world of “B” movies and, ultimately, television – though her next-to-last credit was as a minor character in the opening party scene of The Graduate. But she’s quite good here as a relatively understated femme fatale.