by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I reached out for a “Film
Noir” DVD I had got from a library sale that contained three public-domain
movies, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Scarlet Street, the 1954 film Suddenly (with Frank Sinatra as a would-be Presidential
assassin eight years before he made The Manchurian Candidate and nine years before the real-life assassination
of Sinatra’s friend-turned-enemy, John F. Kennedy) and the one I ran, Quicksand, directed by Irving Pichel, written by Robert
Smith and starring Mickey Rooney. In 1948 Rooney asked to be released from his
MGM contract, which he was following the making of Words and Music (the biopic of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,
with Tom Drake as Rodgers and Rooney as Hart; alas, though they could show
Hart’s psychological disintegration, under the Production Code they couldn’t
explain why it happened or acknowledge that Hart was Gay), and though later he
would say that was the worst career decision he made in his life, for a while
it did seem to open up more and
different roles for him. The imdb.com page for Quicksand (which identified the year of its production as
1950 even though the date given on the DVD box was 1951) identified it as a
Samuel H. Stiefel production for United Artists and listed Stiefel as
“executive producer” and Mort Briskin as “producer.” Various imdb.com “Trivia”
comments on the film contradict each other: one says that Rooney and Peter
Lorre (who’s seen in an important, though brief, supporting role) put up the
money to make the film, while another said that Rooney hated making the movie
so much he wanted to get out of it, only producer Stiefel held him to his
contract.
Quicksand is
actually a reasonably effective noir in which Rooney plays auto mechanic Dan Brady, who works at a garage
owned by the fanatically cheap Mackey (Art Smith) and has a sort-of girlfriend,
Helen (Barbara Bates, best known for one of her briefest credits — as the woman
who clutches Eve Harrington’s acting award and poses in front of a three-way
mirror, dreaming of stardom and practicing her curtain calls, at the end of All
About Eve), only she’s more
interested in him than he in her. Instead he cruises Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney,
James Cagney’s sister, whose most famous credit was playing his sister in Yankee Doodle Dandy), the new cashier at the cheap lunch place near
Mackey’s garage where Dan and Mackey’s other employees regularly eat. Since
Vera is a blonde while Helen is dark-haired, and since composer Louis Gruenberg
(best known for his 1935 one-act opera based on Eugene O’Neill’s play The
Emperor Jones) introduces her with a
“sleazy” saxophone solo, we know immediately that Vera is a “bad girl.” In
order to take her out to a local night spot where Red Nichols’ band is playing,
he needs $20. He tries to borrow it from a co-worker, Harvey (Taylor Holmes),
but his co-worker is also broke, and he has another friend whom he already lent
$20 to and calls him to ask for it back — but the friend can’t repay him until
the next day. Frustrated, Dan steals $20 from the garage’s cash register,
figuring he can get his friend to pay him before the company’s bookkeeper shows
up and notices the register is short — only the bookkeeper shows up two days
early. Needing $20 in a hurry and with his friend in San Diego about to leave
on a fishing trip, Dan buys a $100 watch for $1 down, only he immediately (and
illegally) hocks it, gets $30 (one wonders why the pawnbroker, seeing Dan try
to hock a new watch, doesn’t get suspicious that it was stolen) — only a credit
agent for the jeweler, with the oddly appropriate name “Moriarty” (John
Gallaudet), shows up and demands that Dan either produce the watch or $100
immediately, or else Moriarty will swear out a warrant for his arrest. A
dejected Dan ends up in a bar, where he runs into Chuck (Wally Cassell), the
man who runs the bingo concession at the local amusement park (“played” by the
Santa Monica Pier), who’s throwing $50 bills around like they’re small change
and is worried about getting home in time so his wife won’t miss him.
Where I thought this was going was that Dan would offer him a ride
and pick his pocket on the way, but instead he lets the man get away, then
later on puts a towel in front of his face to use as a mask and sticks up the
bingo-parlor owner in the amusement park’s parking lot. Unfortunately he’s seen
by a woman who works one of the concessions, and in an attempt to get away he
waylays “good girl” Helen and her friend and offers to take them to a movie — but Helen begs off because
she’s already seen the film. Dan finds himself blackmailed by Nick (Peter Lorre),
who runs the arcade in the park (at a time when “arcade games” basically meant
pinball and various variants of it) and who saw Dan commit the robbery and
recovered the towel he used as a mask, which got blood on it. His price for his
silence is that Dan steal him a new car Mackey’s is about to take delivery of —
only Dan, continuing his successful audition for America’s Stupidest
Criminals, is instantly suspected by
Mackey, who demands that Dan either cough up the car or the $3,000 Mackey was
expecting to get for it, or else he will have Dan arrested. On
a date with Vera, during which they finally get to see Red Nichols and his band perform (alas,
they do only one number and most of it is talked over, though we get to see
Nichols and his remarkable bass saxophonist, Joe Rushton), she tells him that
in addition to running an arcade, Nick also runs a clandestine check-cashing
service and keeps his profits from that in a simple lock-box instead of a safe,
and if Dan will only break into Nick’s office after hours he can easily steal
that money and use it to pay off Mackey. Dan does this but he’s spotted by a
night watchman who tries to shoot him, and when he delivers the $3,600 proceeds
to Vera — they take it up to her room with the idea of counting it and
splitting the money — Vera’s hatchet-faced landlady (Minerva Urecal) catches
him and throws him out of her room. By the time they get back together, Vera
has already blown half the robbery proceeds on a $2,000 mink coat she’s been
wanting all movie (she’d even purred seductively to Dan early on, as they
window-shopped on their first date, that she would do “anything” for that
garment), leaving Dan short $1,200 of the money he owes Mackey — and when
Mackey refuses to accept the $1,800 Dan does have, Dan strangles him.
Then things turn around
for Dan when Helen, the “good girl” he abandoned for Vera and his walk on the
wild side, decides she wants to help him even if that means risking getting
herself implicated in his crimes. She’s present while Dan car-jacks a
middle-aged man who turns out to be an attorney who offers to defend Helen if
she’s charged, and though ultimately there’s a shoot-out on the Santa Monica
pier between Dan and two cops who are looking for him because on this
surprisingly wild night another criminal was on the loose and killed two police officers, in the end
Dan loses his gun in the water, is captured alive and told that Mackey survived
the assault and so instead of facing either death or life imprisonment for
murder, he’s only looking at a 1-to-10-year sentence for robbery and assault —
and, the lawyer promises, he’ll do his best to argue that it should be closer
to 1 than 10. Though I don’t have a record of this movie in my computer files,
Charles insisted that we’d seen it together and remembered some details (like
the scene of Rooney trying to pawn the watch) I hadn’t recalled — only we’d
seen it before in a considerably better print (the one we were watching was
from a public-domain DVD that was so low-contrast that instead of black-and-white
this film was in grey-and-white,
hardly the way you want to watch a noir!). Quicksand is an
appropriately titled movie, given the speed with which Rooney’s character
descends from poor but honest proletarian to desperate criminal, and it’s a
good film noir but with two weaknesses
that keep it from the pantheon. One is that by 1951 film noir had “hardened” enough as a genre it had developed its own cliché bank, and one can
mentally envision Robert Smith running a checklist in his head as he typed out
the script to make sure he was getting all the established noir clichés into it. The other is Rooney’s
performance: he’s too guileless to be convincing either in his desperation, his
sexuality (when Nick catches him and Vera — whose name, meaning “truth,” is the
one element of subtlety and irony in Smith’s script — necking in his photo
booth, one’s reaction is, “Will that big woman get off that poor little boy and
leave him alone?”), his criminality or his ultimate regeneration; at times one
gets the impression they could have called this film Andy Hardy Goes Bad.
The following year Rooney would make a
considerably better film noir at his old stamping ground, MGM, The Strip, with the advantages of a major-studio
infrastructure, a more compelling plot, better direction (by the little-known
Leslie Kardos) and even a more formidable guest jazz musician than Red Nichols,
Louis Armstrong — though there again his performance is more than a bit too
Andy Hardy-ish to be credible as a noir protagonist — and I couldn’t help but wish Quicksand could have been made with James Dean in the lead.
In 1951 Dean and Jeanne Cagney (whose superb “bad-girl” performance, along with
Lorre’s reliable villainy, really makes this film — brother James wasn’t the
only one in that family with major acting chops!) worked together in that
bizarre religious TV-movie Hill Number One (Dean’s debut film), Dean as the Apostle John and Cagney, appropriately
given her casting here, as Mary Magdalene — and maybe if Hill Number One had been made before Quicksand and Rooney had started chafing over his own
unsuitability for the lead, Jeanne Cagney might have told Sam Stiefel, “Hey,
there’s this young actor I just did a religious TV show with who might be right
for it … ” As it stands, Quicksand is reliable entertainment and an interesting story, but not as good as
some of Rooney’s other attempts around the time to break free of his
boy-next-door image, including his quite compelling performance as a racing
driver in The Big Wheel (1949)
as well as his next noir attempt,
The Strip. And one quirk of Quicksand is we get rehashes, in a “serious” dramatic
context, of some gags that had earlier appeared in classic comedies: the
business of the young man “borrowing” money he’s responsible for and a
bookkeeper or bank examiner arriving to check the books ahead of schedule is
one of the key plot points in W. C. Fields’ The Bank Dick (1940), and the gag in which Dan, at Nick’s place,
sets off an orchestrion or whatever that thing is called that starts playing a raucous
“carnival” version of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s “Blue Danube Waltz” while Dan is
trying to keep as quiet as possible so he can rob the place was used
delightfully by the Marx Brothers in their 1933 classic Duck Soup (where it was a radio and the tune it was
inappropriately blasting was Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”).
