Thieves Highway (1949)

Richard Conte returns home to discover his father has lost his legs in a trucking accident perpetrated by Lee J. Cobb, an unscrupulous San Francisco produce dealer. Conte partners with the man who bought his father’s truck to get even with Cobb. I would never have thought there was such a thing as the dark underworld of fruit sellers, but here it is. Cobb plays a cunning and ruthlessly charismatic bad guy while Conte is a man who thinks he’s more in control than he is. As a noir, it even includes a femme fatale and the nice, good girl, but neither of them sticks to those simplistic roles.