Rent Quicksand! (1950)

Fifties Noir - Quicksand! review by Steve

Minor film noir which extracts plenty of interest from its lowlife location shoot in Santa Monica, on the Californian coast. Which is a squalid hell! It’s a pessimistic crime-does-not-pay parable with an anti-capitalist subtext; where business and finance chews up the luckless workers... Director Irving Pichel was soon blacklisted by HUAC.

It’s one of a pair of crime films in which Mickey Rooney plays a small town mechanic drawn in by the lure of exotic sex and easy money (see also Drive a Crooked Road, 1954). There’s the usual noir scenario of an ordinary guy who makes one wrong turn…. He takes 20 dollars from the garage cash register, and his whole world caves in.

Pretty soon he’s strangling his corrupt boss with a telephone wire and fleeing down to Mexico in a stolen car. He is drawn into this shabby inferno by a cheap blonde (Jeanne Cagney) who sets up the grease monkey to loot a rundown penny arcade owned by her scuzzy ex-boss, played by a splendidly repellent Peter Lorre.

Does the reckless stooge not have eyes? He is pursued by his girl-next-door ex (Barbara Bates), who is not only not a chiseller, but ten times the babe that the femme fatale is… Still, Mickey is back from the war and wild for kicks. There are echoes of zero budget cult noir, Detour (1945). It isn’t as good but still sleazy fun for genre fans.