Quicksand

Above average, often underrated low budget film noir of a somewhat pleasantly restrained Rooney who finds himself in escalating hot water stemming from his "borrowing" $20 from his employers cash register. (He's a mechanic at a car dealership)

Instead of a comedy of errors, the film is rather a thriller of errors with Rooney making honest and dishonest mistakes/decisions that build on each other from scene to scene to a point that Rooney is desperate to get out of the hot water he finds himself in at every turn. He's in trouble with his nasty boss, his money hungry girlfriend (Jeanne Cagney), the police, a sleazy (Peter Lorre)amusement park gameroom owner, etc...

He's caught in a whirlpool of lies, deceit, and lust (for a snobish/vampish girlfriend who is never satisfied) and a hunger for the money that he feels will get him out of all his trouble. He doesn't appreciate and is callous toward the wholesome girl (ex-girlfriend ??) who seems to want him despite his faults. He's a lot more interested in the allure of the bombshell Jeanne Cagney instead and is bored by Ms. Wholesome.

Rooney biographies claim that Mickey didn't think much of this film since it didn't do much to revive his sagging career in the early 1950's. Still, there's a lot to recommend it...with solid acting, atmospheric black and white photography and staging, especially of the amusement park and oceanside locale.

One of the best "B" pictures ever. The milieu - garage, bar, shoddy amusement park - is appropriate and effectively conveyed. Small people, big dreams, temptation, one seemingly insignificant event leading to another: believable and compelling drama, played out in glaring light and sinister shadows. Peter Lorre's quiet menace and Jeanne Cagney's worldly sleaze are particularly outstanding. Mickey Rooney may be somewhat miscast, but his performance adds notably to the rising tension - as does everything else in this fine picture.

All-time memorable moment: Bumping the gypsy fortune teller's booth in the dark arcade, setting off flashing light and jangling music.

Wow. Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre. Together. And with Jimmie from the Mickey Mouse Club *and* Jack Elam! I didn't know what to expect. In case you were wondering, Rooney proves he can act in the opening scenes. He's a car mechanic looking to get in good with the new waitress at the diner, but he's flat broke until tomorrow. "Danny" starts down a slippery slope by copping a few bucks from the till at work, then lets Vera (Jeanne Cagney) steer him wrong by way of a game arcade owned by her former employer, Nick (Lorre). Nick makes the creepiest possible arcade owner, and Vera pines darkly for a mink coat in a store window. These are not good people to fall in with.

While the film starts out pretty cleverly, the coincidences start to pile up fast and furious. Danny's little white theft festers into a mugging, grand theft auto, a burglary, and worse. The wrong people keep finding out too much about Danny's activities, and soon the cops are crawling all over him.

The acting is quite good, and the direction and pacing are clean. But the wild improbabilities that have piled up threaten to topple the whole house of cards, from the convenient witnesses to the convenient cops to the convenient car trouble. Remember: Danny is an auto mechanic. He can't keep his own car in running condition? Still, it's a treat to see Rooney in such desperate straits. For those looking for Raymond Chandler, tho, this isn't noir; it's still just melodrama.

Quicksand is immediately at pains to establish that auto-mechanic Dan Brady (Mickey Rooney) is a *very* average guy, there's no monotone narrator to say, "Be careful or this may happen to you" but there might as well be. The first fifteen minutes or so drag along interminably through a lunch-counter and a mechanic shot before Dan "borrows" a twenty from the register to take a blonde out dancing, thus beginning a brief but intense criminal career.

Rooney is surprisingly convincing as the dissatisfied, and really quite dishonest, mechanic. He doesn't try anything cute, playing this role as straight as any I've ever seen out of him (admittedly not much), though his "inner monologue" narration rapidly wears out its welcome. Despite his being set up as an everyman character, I found him pleasingly sneaky, cowardly, and unlikeable.

The afore-mentioned blonde is Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney). Brady has already been provided with a self-sacrificing brunette good girl that he's trying to get rid of, so right away you know that the only question you've got to answer about the blonde Vera is whether she's a broad, a dame, a floozie, or a hussy (turns out she's two of the four, but I'll let you find out which). Cagney is really only passable as the manipulative, materialistic, femme fatale.

Peter Lorre shows up, barely, as Nick, the crooked owner of a penny arcade where Vera once worked. Lorre and Rooney engage in some minor fisticuffs over Cagney (who must have been thinking that her brother could take them both with one hand tied behind his back).

After the tepid opening Quicksand actually does build up a decent head of steam as Dan Brady sinks deeper and deeper into the eponymous morass. It's clearly a written-to-order morality play but it moves quickly, punches hard enough to get the job done, and isn't entirely unbelievable. In the end melodrama beats film noir by a nose, or is it a couple furlongs? I couldn't help thinking Quicksand zigged when it should have zagged.

If you have then this film is for you. Mickey Rooney plays a mechanic who wants to take a waitress out on a date but doesn't have enough cash to impress her with. He steals and then needs to commit more crimes and bigger crimes to cover his tracks. Finally his walk on the wildside ends in murder. But is the guy dead or just knocked out?

Without giving away the ending a similar film is Detour which had a lot of trouble with the censors for its own ending. In my opinion braving the censors gives Detour more punch. But Quicksand is still an enjoyable Film Noir and one of my favourite Mickey Rooney films. We see Rooney in too many musicals and family films. Quicksand gives him a dark side.