The Film Noir Collection: Quicksand

'Revelation' are a DVD distributor that I like a lot. They're great to deal with and they produce some really nice packages, particularly in relation to Japanese anime. So why are they marketing third rate transfers like this one, already available in the public domain and repeatedly sold as part of 'three-films-for-quid' DVD's without doing the honourable thing and finding a decent print, and organising a decent transfer? Apart from a nice cover, featuring the original movie poster, there's no reason to replace an existing sub-standard copy with this one. In common with the two other releases that I've endured in their 'Film Noir Collection' this is a perfectly enjoyable film, but a shoddy print.

'Quicksand' was made in 1950 and is fiercely moralistic. During these austere post-war years, with the cold-war about to take on a high resonance, propaganda pictures like this one were the norm. These days we'd probably cynically reach for the sick bucket. The plot put me in mind of a sixties public service movie that we would be shown annually at school in the US called 'Monkey on my back' which, in true shaggy dog story fashion, started with a teenager drinking, then smoking weed, progressing through various narcotics before ending up hooked on heroin and completely destitute.

'Quicksand' takes a similar narrative form. Featuring a fresh faced Mickey Rooney as a normal Joe (a mechanic) who is popular with his colleagues, it tells the dark tale of his fall into a spiral of crime, despite his 'innocent' beginnings. Other than a creepily charismatic Peter Lorre, there is little in this to justify the film noir classification. This is a moralistic teen movie that shouts 'crime doesn't pay' - regardless of how slight the initial misdemeanour.



Dan Brady (Rooney) is a young auto-mechanic and, having fallen for a good looking blonde at a bar (femme fatale, Vera Novak) he needs $20 to take her out. Unable to get a loan from a friend, he resorts to 'borrowing' the money from the garage till until his friend can pay him the money he owes. Brady thinks his friend will pay him the following day which will be plenty of time to replace the money before the weekly visit from the bookkeeper.



However, the bookkeeper turns up early, and before long Brady is thrown into a quicksand of crime. Unable to pay the $20 back, Brady tries to buy some jewellery on credit which he then pawns for the cash. Only the jeweller calls in the loan when Brady's story didn't match up so he has less than 24 hours to pay the Jeweller. He tries to well his wheels but it's clear that they are now worth less than the outstanding finance so Brady bankrolls a drunk who has been flashing his money around. Peter Lorre, playing a seedy owner of a pinball arcade (who has some history with Vera) figures out that Rooney was responsible for the mugging and he bribes him into stealing a vehicle. By now, Rooney is in so deep he doesn't know which way to turn. He's fast becoming the biggest hoodlum in town.
Without spoiling the ending too much, it's worth noting that the film, despite its shaggy dog story narrative, does gain momentum and delivers a stylish climax.



Apparently Rooney and Lorre financed the picture themselves but, ironically, were cheated out of their profits by a third partner.
Overall, this is a very enjoyable 70 minutes but it always takes me a while to drop out of a stew about bad transfers and start enjoying the film regardless. That's not easy to do when the film is in as poor a state as this, though for the record, it is slightly better than the atrocious 'Woman on the Run' feature which has also been issued as part of this set.

There are, predictably, no extra features.