Quine wrote Drive a Crooked Road with his friend Blake Edwards, both having started out as actors at Columbia Pictures. Edwards always had a skill for comedy (my favorite of his films is The Party, 1968), though he did make a handful of melodramas. Quine also worked mostly in comedy, though with less commercial and artistic success than Edwards. Quine, however, made two excellent films noirs in 1954: Pushover and Drive a Crooked Road.
Drive a Crooked Road has an impressive performance by Mickey Rooney, who was constantly trying to reinvent himself after he was let go by MGM in the late forties. In the Quine film he plays a lonely young man, living in a rented room full of second-place car racing trophies and working as an auto mechanic, just the kind of guy who can be lured by beautiful Dianne Foster to drive the getaway car in a bank robbery by slick operators Kevin McCarthy and Jack Kelly. Rooney is so desperate for love he never even thinks he is being conned and plans that he and Forster will take his share of the stolen loot to Europe, where he can race in important auto races.
The film is an example of what I would call suburban noir: it takes place mostly in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the daytime, with its inevitable existential violent ending taking place at night. Foster is the mistress of McCarthy and has complicated feelings about how Rooney is being used, i.e., she is not the typical femme fatale of film noir. Rooney's performance is a masterpiece of grim fatalism; without actually saying much his expressions convey the deteriorating hope of someone lost in the shuffle of 50's America.
No comments:
Post a Comment