Hell Drivers

As Quentin Tarantino correctly observed, “British guys fucking love Hell Drivers.” Dubbed the English Wages of Fear, Cy Endfield’s gritty masterpiece opens up AFS Cinema’s new series, This Nation’s Saving Grace, highlighting soot-covered gems from the 1950s and early 1960s UK, including Teddy Boy classic Beat Girl, Soho strip club crawl The Small World of Sammy Lee, and All Night Long, a reenvisioning of Othello in London’s jazz scene. But with an all-star cast of postwar British cinema, including comedy legends Alfie Bass and Sid James, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoohan, a never-better Stanley Baker, and a very young Sean Connery, and a high-stakes plot about corruption and disposable employees, Hell Drivers puts the “essential” in AFS’s Essential Cinema. – Richard Whittaker