I got in trouble as a young boy for coloring on my dad’s favorite shirt. When the fuzz (my parents) started to close in on me, I did the only thing a precocious child knows to do: put the marker in my sister’s room and cry ignorance. I was inevitably caught and punished; not just for coloring on the shirt, but for lying about it. Quicksand, the 1950 film from director Irving Pichel, is an extrapolation of this morality tale using a feature length film to show–with varying degrees of success–what happens when you commit a greater transgression to hide a lesser one.
Mickey Rooney plays Dan Brady, an affable auto mechanic who spends his free time shooting the shit and chasing women. When he meets Vera (Jeanne Cagney), a stunning beauty who works at his local diner, he promises to take her out for a night on the town, despite not having the cash to do so. So he “borrows” twenty bucks out of the register he mans at the body shop. But when he is unable to replace the money in time, he resorts to greater and greater crimes until his minor moral indiscretion becomes a complete corruption of his virtues.
Given the nature of Dan’s escalating criminal activities, the stakes continue to heighten. He steals and pawns a watch to replace the twenty bucks in the register. When he’s caught for stealing the watch, he mugs a wealthy drunk. And so on and what not. The film is perhaps too eager to build on Dan’s previous crime to heighten his next, without ever allowing Dan, or the film itself, to answer to the offenses that lead to the ultimate crescendo. The consequences for Dan’s actions are only ever as great as his most recent crime. It seems Quicksand is building towards one of two conclusions: a complete criminal transformation or a devastating reckoning. The conclusion delivers neither, and is instead limp and disarming. Despite taking the scenic route getting there, Quicksand’s destination is disappointing; like driving by a theme park on a school field trip only to end up at a forgotten city playground.
Though Mickey Rooney is fantastic throughout, Quicksand often lulls when moving from one crime to the next. Luckily, Peter Lorre’s presence as Nick, the manager of a penny arcade who Dan crosses (in more ways than one), makes even the most trivial bit of exposition incredibly more bizarre and watchable. It’s no revelation that Lorre was a commanding actor; but it’s often easy to take his skills for granted in masterful films like The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca, when Lorre’s performance is merely a brilliant brush stroke in a transcendent painting. But when watching Lorre in a mediocre film, like Quicksand, his brilliance is magnified. As Nick, a character who the screenplay demands be just one of nearly a dozen heels, Lorre uses less than fifteen minutes of screen time to turn a forgettable peripheral character into a creature worth remembering.
Quicksand, though ultimately more enjoyable than not (if only slightly), seems to have been a casualty of the Hays Code, often promising to be more subversive than it eventually becomes. Whereas better films found creative ways to work around Will Hays’ misguided parameters of morality (Bringing Up Baby being a personal favorite, that, in hindsight, is as filthy as any Todd Phillips film), Quicksand seems indebted to upholding the standards of the Hays Code first and foremost; interesting filmmaking is secondary.
“fuzz?” My how retro! If you were smarter, you’d have stained your sister’s fingers with the marker and would not have pussied out when confronted. Of course, she would have eventually killed you in your sleep.
“fuzz?” My how retro! If you were smarter, you’d have stained your sister’s fingers with the marker and would not have pussied out when confronted. Of course, she would have eventually killed you in your sleep.