Last night's movie was "Quicksand"(1950), a Noir starring Mickey Rooney in which The Mick plays an auto mechanic who dumps nice girl Helen (Barbara Bates) for the more dangerous Vera (Jeanne Cagney), a tough broad who works at a local cafe. Mickey is looking for excitement; Vera provides it, but to take her out, he needs money. Instead of waiting til payday. he sneaks a twenty spot out of the auto shop's cash register, vowing to himself that he'll put it back once he gets his check. Unfortunately, his boss calls in an accountant to do a random audit of the books, and Rooney is in the hot seat. To avoid being busted, he runs down to the jewelry store, buys a $100 watch on credit, then sprints down to the pawn shop to hock it for 30 bucks. He puts twenty back into the register, which saves him from his boss, and then - relieved - he heads over to the cafe to take Vera out for a night on the town.
But Vera is trouble, which he should have known, being that she's James Cagney's sister. Like her older brother, Jeanne/Vera knows all the local hoodlums, in particular Peter Lorre, an arcade owner who also runs numbers for a gang.
Mickey is soon being dogged by a fraud inspector, sicced on him by the owner of the jewelry store, who found out that Mick pawned a watch he didn't own (you can't sell something you haven't paid off, at least in the movie). Finally, in order to get everyone off his back, Vera persuades Mickey to rob Peter Lorre, who has a loaded cashbox hidden in the back room of his pinball joint. She knows where it's located, they can use the dough to skip town. But as anyone knows, it's a mistake to mess with Peter Lorre. His voice alone is lethal, and Rooney is no master criminal. He's just a guy who lifted twenty bucks from the till in order to impress a new date. Now he's in over his head in "Quicksand", which is the title of the movie and so we're right back where we started.
Can you believe that Mickey Rooney, who was short of stature and not classically handsome, was the #1 male box office star in America for the years 1939 - 1941? Yes indeed, it was The Mick who ruled the theaters during that period, not Clark Gable, Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart, and the reason - so far as I am able to see - was his energy, his force of personality, and his wide range of talent. No less than Sir Laurence Olivier called him "the best there has ever been" (I got that from Wiki). Now, I myself have not seen a great deal of Rooney's work. I haven't seen any of the Andy Hardy pictures that made him famous. But I have seen him in roles as diverse as the horse trainer in the wonderful film "Black Stallion", which he made in late middle age, and "Puck", in William Dieterle's adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which was filmed when he was 14. So Rooney could do Shakespeare even as a kid. He could also dance and sing, and in that way he was multitalented like Judy Garland and James Cagney. Anyhow, read his bio on Wikipedia if you're interested. People my age may remember him as being in the news in his later years for all the wrong reasons, and there is no doubt he was a victim of his own excess. He was married eight times, but one of them was to Ava Gardner. To sum up, although I've only seen a few of his movies, there is no doubt that he was a very good actor, a Hollywood megastar, and a crash-and-burn celebrity all in one.
Read his Wiki just for the hell of it. As for "Quicksand", it was a solid noir with good acting and a nice plot twist involving Mick's two girlfriends (the good girl and the bad girl), but the gimmick of him getting in deeper and deeper trouble after stealing that first twenty began to wear thin. Still, it's recommended, and it has some great location footage from Santa Monica circa 1950. /////
Tonight's movie was "The Thing With Two Heads"(1972), starring former Oscar winner Ray Milland, who obviously needed a paycheck, and Los Angeles Rams star Rosey Grier, who at the time was also famous for his book about macrame. And he subdued Sirhan Sirhan, who didn't kill Robert F. Kennedy but was only a Manchurian Candidate. That picture would've been a much better selection than this one, which started out as a decent Cormanesque monster flick ala "The Manster", but then devolved into a Burt Reynolds chase movie, with the Rosey/Ray "doubleheader" riding around on a motorcycle for half an hour, in the hills of Agoura, the two heads jabbering at one another in a blaxploitation motif. About two dozen cop cars were destroyed in the chase, parts of which must still be embedded in the landscape. The viewer was left thinking that a two-headed director must've helmed this film, and it would've been nice if Sirhan showed up to end it early. But no such luck, avoid at all costs. ////
See you in the morning. Tons and tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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