Drive a Crooked Road

This film in the Columbia Noir series on the Criterion Channel is actually a noir. Drive a Crooked Road, directed by Richard Quine and released in 1954, features Mickey Rooney in a decidedly un-Andy Hardy role, but he's very good. The plot is a little obvious, especially if you're into noir, but it's a fine little film.

Rooney plays a mechanic who's a very good amateur race car driver. He's morbidly shy, so is shocked that a beautiful woman, Dianne Foster, is interested in him. She introduces him to her friend, Kevin McCarthy, who eventually asks Rooney to be the get away driver in a bank heist. Rooney, who plays the traditional film noir sap pining for a femme fatale, agrees.

I won't give away more than that, but the film crackles with life. Rooney hardly says a word, but his expressions speak volumes. He really was a good actor, though in later life he became a character on talk shows. McCarthy is also good, a suave guy with a mercenary heart, and his sidekick, Jack Kelly (who later co-starred with James Garner on Maverick) has a lot of comic lines, though his ending is not very funny.

When I watch films like these, in which a guy does things that are very stupid for a pretty girl who shows attention to him, I completely empathize. I've done lots of stupid things for women. When a man imagines that a girl is in love with him his brain goes into hiding. It's not always sexual--sometimes it's just the very idea that of all the guys in the world, she's into him. But in noir, it always comes crashing down around him. It's how he reacts to this heartbreak that determines who he is as a man.

Drive a Crooked Road also has some nice car footage. The escape after the heist covers about five minutes of film, showing the men in the car, then the car, then back again, but it's gripping. A car going 100 miles an hour in 1954, on an unpaved road, without the shock absorbers we're used to, must have been quite a hair-raising ride.