The Devil Thumbs a Ride

I really need to see this little gem again. Tierney really is the whole movie.

TCM runs "The Devil Thumbs A Ride" early in the mornings on rare occasions. On one of those I taped it several years ago, lent it to a brother and never got it back. GRR.

Its plot is one those relentless, improbable stories with so many loose ends you cannot conceive of them all being tied up in 63 minutes.

BTW, Tierney was the older brother of actor Scott Brady, who appeared in "He Walked By Night," "Johnny Guitar," "The China Syndrome" and many other films. More visible, but not as good an actor as his older bro. IMHO

Lawrence Tierney singlehandedly lifts this poverty row cheapie from lowbrow crime melodrama anonymity to the upper pantheon of low budget noir exploitation immortality. Bears some resemblance to other low budget limited set piece claustrophobic pics like THE DESPERATE HOURS or PETRIFIED FOREST, but don't dwell on that. There are a lot of strangled laughs given the tense set-up, but don't dwell on that, either. Ignore the implausibilities and wildly uneven acting and revel instead in young Tierney's charismatic menace and casual sadism. He so dominates the proceedings that any analysis of plot points (fairly lacking) or cinematography (surprisingly good) or direction (not so hot) really pales in comparison. One of those rare films that has such bad performances that it is an instant classic yet also featuring such a standout performance from Tierney that it is also an instant classic. Trust me on this one, brother... don't miss this obscure but vital piece of 50s Americrimedramacana. You will be amused and amazed, horrified and entertained, but most of all... you will not soon forget the experience.

First of all, let's get something straight. "The Devil Thumbs A Ride" is the BEST title in the history of motion pictures. Hands down. It's not even close. What a vivid and startling image those words conjure up in the mind's eye.

This is a movie I've been trying to track down for years and it does not disappoint. It's surprisingly nasty considering the year it was made, though always with a wingy "now let's not take any of this too seriously folks" feel to it. It's as if the director, Felix Feist, was hired to crank out a simple little crime quickie with a good guy, a bad guy, a nice girl and a bad girl, but wasn't quite sure how to do that (sort of like a gifted baseball pitcher who just can't throw any pitch straight). So he tosses everything into a blender and twists it into a swirling, pulpy freak show. The bad guy seems too cool and in control, the "good" guy is sort of a creep, the nice girl meets a shocking fate, and the bad girl almost steals the show. Certainly a zippy, wicked ancestor of Tarantino and all the Tarantino knock-offs that litter the shelves at Blockbuster.

Feist was a breathless, inventive director who really knew how to move the camera and keep things humming along. (His movies are incredibly tightly paced.) The vacuum cleaner scene, played without dialogue, is a real highlight. And Lawrence Tierney of course, is excellent. When he advises "better let me take the wheel", you know it's going to be a wild ride.

There are some goofy B-movie slip-ups (the cop who agrees to let the gas station attendant come along on the chase for the killer, for one) but that only adds to its charm. One of the cruelest code-era films I've seen, it has a slapped on happy ending that seems to go about as well as perfume on a chainsaw. Richly deserving of its growing cult.

Laurence Tierney seems to have been born to play this role. He is sinister, amoral, nasty. It's beautifully filmed and superbly directed, though it has a raw feel.

Tiernry is the title character. A devil he surely is. He gets the poor dope who picks him up a very hard time. The two women they then give rides to fare even less well.

Betty Lawford is perfect as the tough, over-the-hill floozy of those two. She is always looking for a deal for herself -- silk stockings, salvation... We like her, though, and feel that we may have encountered her or her like behind countless counters.

We feel bad for the gas station attendant when Tierney says cruel things about the picture of his young daughter. There is no doubt: Tierney's character is a dreadful person. But the gas station attendant is a pain himself. He's an annoying know-it-all.

The police are not portrayed in a very favorable light, either. So who do we actually like? Maybe the younger of the two hitchhikers, Beulah. Her older pal, though we surely do not admire her. The watchman Tierney cruelly gets drunk? Not really.

It's a slice of life cut with a hatchet and the slice is not pretty no matter what angle we look at it from.

Over the decades, Felix Feist's The Devil Thumbs A Ride has gathered a fierce reputation as some sort of ultimate, quick-and-dirty film noir (like Detour). It's not quite that. Its dark star, Laurence Tierney, was more explosively, unpredictably violent in Born to Kill (and he had Claire Trevor at her malevolent best to play against). And Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker corners the market on the terrors of the lonely road, come nightfall. (The better part of Devil Thumbs A Ride, by contrast, occur in a posh beach house somewhere between San Diego and Los Angeles). But the ensemble cast works well together -- Betty Lawford as good-time-gal Agnes is especially memorable. The end is somewhat troublesome; the necessary "restoration to normalcy" is abrupt and discordantly upbeat. The best films noirs close on a greyer, more ambiguous note. Still, this may be the finest 63-minute film ever made, and a key piece in the noir cycle.