It’s easy to get in over your head when you’re only five
foot two. Mickey Rooney found that out the hard way in the fifties. For much of
the preceding decade he had been the chipper face of American optimism—the
fast-talking little guy with the can do attitude. But Hollywood started to go
dark around the time that Rooney’s star persona began to decline in public
favor. Of course, the public would always like Mickey Rooney, but the postwar
years coincided with the end of Rooney’s unnaturally long adolescence (only as
he neared thirty years old did he age out of spunky teenager roles). He began
taking on adult roles, and that meant occasional forays into Noir City. He made
the excellent QUICKSAND in 1950, and then in 1954 he hit the jackpot with DRIVE
A CROOKED ROAD.
In the film, Rooney plays Eddie Shannon, a mechanic and
part-time race car driver. Without knowing it, Eddie’s caught the attention of
a group of bank robbers led by Steve Norris (Kevin McCarthy). Norris needs a
wheel man for a job he’s planning, a job which will require a driver of great
skill. He dispatches his sexy girlfriend Barbara (Diane Foster) to seduce the
little guy and talk him into helping them pull the job. Eddie balks at first,
but he’s simply too in love with Barbara. He joins the gang for the bank heist.
What happens next is interesting. We might expect the bank
job to go badly, or for Norris and his gang to stiff Eddie on the money, but
the film makes a rather unexpected detour. The money, oddly enough for a film
noir, isn’t really the sticking point here. The fallout and the violence that
follows it are really over matters of love.
In QUICKSAND, Rooney played another mechanic who meets the
wrong woman and ends up suffering for it, but in that film, he’s still got some
spring in his step. Here, though, we find him playing a very different kind of
role. Eddie Shannon is an odd little guy. The film uses none of the usual
tricks to disguise the actor’s height. Everyone in the film, including Foster,
towers over him. But the film uses his diminutive stature as a physical
representation of his essential character. Shannon is quiet, even around his
buddies at work, and Rooney is surprisingly effective as an introvert. Eddie
Shannon is a lonely man, and the gang picks him out because he’s a lonely man.
This makes his relationship with Barbara all the more tense.
What ratchets up the emotional stakes, though, are Barbra’s conflicted feelings
about her assignment. She seduces the sad little mechanic, but it’s a seduction
of the heart. The two don’t even share a kiss. They talk, and she invites
Shannon to dream big dreams for the first time in his life. He falls in love,
not lust. We get the sense this job would be easier on her if it was only
physical. Dianne Foster didn’t make much of an impact in films before being
relegated to television and then retiring in the mid-sixties, but make no
mistake about it: she was a hell of an actress. Her performance here is
topnotch.
The entire film is topnotch. The bank robbery, for instance,
gains tension by staying in the car with the getaway driver. And the mad dash
that follows the robbery, as Shannon and the robbers race down a twisted back
road in order to get to the highway before roadblocks can be set up, is a
nail-biting blend of back projection and stunt driving. This kind of thing was
often done badly in older films (indeed, the first shots of this movie are a pretty
poor display of sloppy back projection), but Shannon’s race through the desert
is a fine piece of action direction.
The film was directed by Richard Quine and written by Quine
and his frequent collaborator Blake Edwards (James Benson Nablo). Both Quine
and Edwards started out as actors, and both usually specialized in comedy. This
might explain the wealth of snappy lines in DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD, as when
Norris tells a drunk girl at a party, “Dear love, why don’t you go somewhere
and pass out like a lady?” It doesn’t explain, though, the aura of heartbreak
that hovers over the film. This is one of the saddest of noirs — the story of
lonely man who’s taken for a sucker by a gang of sharks. Throughout, Quine
directs with intelligence and restraint. The final scenes here, as Shannon
confronts the woman he loves and finds out the awful truth about her and the
handsome bank robber, are both exciting and tragic.
Richard Quine was himself a tragic case. A gifted director,
his life was beset by misfortune. In 1945, his wife, actress Susan Peters,
accidently shot and crippled herself in a hunting accident. As Peters fell into
a deep depression, their marriage faltered and after they divorced in 1948,
Peters got worse and in 1952 starved herself to death. Quine struggled to find
his equilibrium. Working at Columbia he was confined mostly to comedies, though
in 1954 he made both DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD and the excellent Fred McMurray/Kim
Novak film PUSHOVER. During PUSHOVER, he had a brief but intense affair with
Novak that ended with her leaving him at the altar. Quine eventually married
actress Fran Jeffries, and directed a string of successful comedies, but he
remained a fundamentally sad, troubled man. In 1989, he shot and killed himself
in his home in Beverly Hills.
Rooney’s career continued its decline after this film, of
course, and he never came close to reclaiming his box office mantle. Perhaps
more importantly, he never really reclaimed his place in the culture. As the
years have gone on, the Andy Hardy movies that made him an American symbol are
more and more relics of the past. They have historical importance, of course, but
I don’t get the sense that Mickey Rooney has had anything like the longevity of
Shirley Temple or Judy Garland. A lot of kids still watch Temple. And every kid
I know still loves the THE WIZARD OF OZ. Mickey Rooney, on the other hand, is
just lucky that he got teamed so many times with Garland before she outgrew
him.
All of which is to say that as Rooney’s big hits dim in the
distance, there is more room to evaluate some of his later work. And his work
in noir — particularly QUICKSAND and the 1951 musical noir THE STRIP — are very
good. And one film, DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD — might be the best thing he ever did.
Note: DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD will be showing next week at Noir City Chicago.
