Martin BUCKLEY

'Stanley Baker liked his cars and got some good ones under his belt: the Bentley S3 he drives in Robbery was his own'

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For some reason, films involving heavy goods vehicles became popular in the 1950s.

Think of The Long Haul (Victor Mature, Diana Dors and a Leyland Octopus) or, for those with more art-house tastes (it’s got subtitles), The Wages of Fear - which is a great title for a film about desperate men driving a Dodge full of nitroglycerin through a flyblown South American hellhole.

Even in more mundane UK circumstances there was a sort of romance about the job. This was a world of manly men, heaving on large, unassisted steering wheels, negotiating crash ‘boxes through the night, cabs lit only by dash lights as they traversed the trunk roads, looking for the next chips-with-everything greasy spoon. Here lay the promise of strong tea, a jukebox, a fry-up and the possibility of picking up some naïve young hitchhiker from the provinces, looking for a lift to the bright lights of London. You can almost smell the Brylcreem and the woodbines just thinking about it.

My pick of the genre is