Truck Busters

TCM has been running a bunch of short (right around an hour) B movies as part of the Saturday matinee block. One that I hadn't seen before is Truck Busters, which has an interesting enough plot, so recently I watched it.

The movie was released in 1943, which is during World War II, of course, a time which came with any number of economic hardships for the war effort. One of those was a curtailment of the production of automobiles and domestic trucks in exchange for the factories churning out tanks. This was going to hurt those truckers who couldn't maintain their trucks, and as is the case with all regulation, it served as a barrier to entry for the little guys and would leave the market with a few consolidated actors, much easier for the government to control (which of course is the purpose of all regulation).

The Dorgan brothers, Casey (Richard Travis) and Jimmy (Charles Lang) are the nominal head of the independent truckers in their neck of the woods, the two co-owning a truck and driving it together, one keeping up driving while the other sleeps. Like a lot of the truckers, they've got payments to make on their trucks and if they could pay off on a new truck before the end of production, great.

The big guys want to stop that, and with that in mind come up with the idea of buying up the finance company and calling in as many of the truckers' loans as they can so that when the truckers can't pay, they can just send in repo men. They get Bonetti (Don Costello), who seems like a gangster, to buy the finance company and run it. And when the truckers keep on trucking, he's going to resort to violence.

Now, Casey has a girlfriend in former waitress Eadie (Virginia Christine) while Jimmy has a wife in Peggy (Ruth Ford), who is about to tell him she's pregnant, which is a sure sign that she's going to end up a widow with a now fatherless child. Sure enough, the thugs drive the Dorgans off the road, killing Jimmy in the accident. Casey wants to take the law into his own hands.

Truck Busters is one of those Warner Bros. B movies that's pretty good as far as B movies go. No big names here, and no new territory; again it's the sort of material that in the 1950s would have been fodder for a TV episode of some sort (probably a private eye trying to help the truckers against the gangsters or something similar). But it's more than entertaining enough, packing a decent amount of action into its just under an hour running time.

Truck Busters got a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, but this is another movie that really needs to be in a cheap box set of Warner B movies or some such, four or six on two DVDs. If it shows up on TV it's definitely worth a watch, but I wouldn't pay. (Amazon lists it as currently being available on Prime Video for a $2.99 rental.)