Hi-Jack Highway aka Gas-Oil (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 15, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Gilles GrangierRelease Date(s)
1955 (March 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Intermondia Films/Rank (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
A decidedly low-wattage French noir thriller, Hi-Jack Highway (1955) has a thin, mostly uneventful plot that, with minor alterations, could easily fit a 30-minute episode of Highway Patrol. Its lack of a compelling story notwithstanding, it’s quite enjoyable anyway thanks to its stars, the great Jean Gabin and Jeanne Moreau, and its beguiling setting.
Gabin plays independent working-class trucker Jean, still paying off his new rig, his orbit limited to other trucker friends like cantankerous old-timer Lucien Ragondin (Camille Guérini) and his truck driver son Pierrot (Marcel Bozzuffi, later of The French Connection). Jean also has a girlfriend, Alice (Jeanne Moreau), a schoolteacher in a provincial town, whom he visits whenever he’s in her neighborhood. That relationship is quite interesting and well-acted: mildly scandalous within the village, the casual lovers are like old-marrieds. She’d like to give up teaching but doesn’t want to move in with him, aware that he’d be away most of the time and hanging around with his trucking friends when not working. Circumstances force this unresolved issue.
One rainy evening Jean is driving his rig when he accidentally runs over a body lying in the middle of the road, next to the man’s automobile. Unsure whether the man was already dead or not, Jean goes to the police but his truck is impounded during the investigation, which, of course, means Jean can’t work. Unknown to the local police, the dead man was part of a 50-million-Franc robbery who ran off with the loot, the high-and-dry gangsters, along with the man’s widow, Camille (Gaby Basset), believe Jean made off with the briefcase containing the money.
The superior French title was Gas-Oil; no hijacking occurs in the film, and most of the truck driving is on rural backroads, not highways. Indeed, not much of anything happens during the film’s first hour, and the gangsters are curiously tentative and even inept; for much of the film, they follow Jean around in a gray Ford Vedette sedan but seem to want to avoid any confrontation, despite all their big talk. Increasingly exasperated by their presence, Jean confronts them at a truck stop café. The gangsters outnumber the unarmed Jean and are packing heat, including a machine gun. But Jean has the decided advantage: he’s played by Jean Gabin, and that great, unfazeable stone face, like Cagney or Mitchum, can stare down an army.
Supposedly Hi-Jack Highway was inspired by the success of The Wages of Fear, but it’s closer in tone (if hardly the pacing) of Hell Drivers, made a few years later. Gabin, Moreau, and the 1950s truck drivers’ milieu is the entire film, rather than the crime story, a remote threat not integrated into the plot very well. It is, however, fascinating as a piece of history to watch this movie-imagined world of rural truckers and their gas-guzzling rigs, the various colorful truck stops and cafés, singularly Gallic compared to ‘50s American ones.
No longer the strikingly handsome leading man he was in the 1930s, Gabin, now stocky but still ruggedly good-looking, had by this time become superficially inexpressive, garnering some criticism but, like, say, the supposedly wooden-Indian acting of Charles Bronson in his later films, Gabin’s star power is undiminished, and the criticism not really valid. Like Bronson, Gabin inhabited the role he played: here he plays a working-class truck driver and, for all intent and purposes, he is a truck driver, his reactions to everything that happen to him entirely credible. Like Robert Mitchum, who famously never seemed to be acting when the cameras were rolling, Gabin somehow still comes alive onscreen.
Hi-Jack Highway was Jeanne Moreau’s fourteenth movie, but one of her first leading parts. Considering her subsequent success opposite much younger men in movies like Jules and Jim, it’s a little disconcerting seeing her in bed with Gabin, a man old enough to be her father, yet the actors make that relationship believable. Indeed, more than the crime elements of the story, what makes the film worthwhile is watching them together, discussing their unusual relationship, which is pleasantly accepting of their differences.
Kino’s Blu-ray is derived from a 4K restoration by TF1. The black-and-white, 1.37:1 full-frame presentation is superb, the image clean and razor-sharp with excellent blacks. A brief overture (over black) opens the film. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also fine, supported by optional English subtitles. The disc is Region “A” encoded.
Extras are limited to a trailer and a new audio commentary by film critic and author Simon Abrams. The commentary is well-researched and full of interesting information and observations.
Hi-Jack Highway may not rank among the great French crime films, but it is certainly interesting in other respects, with Jean Gabin and Jeanne Moreau making it worthwhile.
- Stuart Galbraith IV