"One of the best of a large number of inexpensive but efficient British films that Warners made in the 1930s.... Warners in Hollywood...appropriated the title and the truck-driving theme of part of the story, used it for their own Raoul Walsh-Humphrey Bogart film, and promptly forgot the original. (In Britain, the Bogart film was re-christened The Road to Frisco.).... This is one of the best films of (the) obscure British director Arthur Woods, who (was) just establishing himself in his real niche--really tight thrillers--when he was killed.... They Drive By Night curiously divides itself into two halves. The first is grim, bitter, realistic, done largely on location, and with a feeling akin to the contemporary Fritz Lang and the later Jules Dassin. Then, mid-way, it casually reveals its murderer and switches moods entirely, becoming a flamboyant (though never tongue-in-cheek) 'chiller' in the tradition of The Old Dark House, with Ernest Thesiger turning in a positive apotheosis of a performance as a witty if potty sex killer, whose self-admiration is never quite comical enough to minimize his real menace." William K. Everson