By David in TN TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Richard Quine’s Drive a Crooked Road (1954) with Mickey Rooney, Dianne Foster, Kevin McCarthy and Jack Kelly.
Film Noir Guide: “Rooney plays a shy, lonely, auto mechanic who dreams of becoming a professional race car driver. Capitalizing on his loneliness, Foster, sexy girlfriend of bank robber McCarthy, lures Rooney into joining the planned heist of a Palm Beach bank.
“After refusing McCarthy’s offer of fifteen grand to drive the getaway car, Rooney relents when Foster drops him. Rooney gives a surprisingly sensitive performance as the lovesick mechanic, and Foster is excellent as the femme fatale whose conscience pangs might cost Rooney his life. Kelly (brother Bart TV’s Maverick) plays McCarthy’s partner.”
David in TN: A standard Noir trope of a sap lured to his doom by a woman.
TCM has a bonus on Saturday at Noon ET, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).
This is the first police procedural, still about the best. On location shooting shows New York City and the people who lived and worked there in 1947-48. Some reviewers think the climax was on the Brooklyn Bridge. A sign clearly reads “Williamsburg Bridge.”
N.S.: “Rooney gives a surprisingly sensitive performance” is bunk. Mickey Rooney was one of the greatest performers in the history of recorded art, and he was the ultimate trouper ((with 1,131 TV and movie credits, by my count!). There was nothing he couldn’t do. He could sing, he could dance, he could make you laugh, he could make you cry. Thus, only if he had an off day, could you call it “surprising.”
When Rooney (1920-2014) and Judy Garland (1922-1969) co-starred in pictures for MGM as teenagers, there was more talent on the screen at the same time than currently exists in the entire world.
He’s also one of those guys that got away. Towards the end of his life, I told myself that it was because he appeared to be senile in a commercial he made with his last wife that I didn’t hunt him down for an interview. But how was I going to do due diligence on him? Doing due diligence for a profile of Joe Yule Jr. was a job that would take a lifetime.
Friday, September 10, 2021 at 6:46:00 P.M. EDT
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On Wednesday Night at Midnight ET, TCM shows Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949), based on William Faulkner's novel. Juano Hernandez plays a cantankerous black man accused of murder. David Brian plays the lawyer who defends him. Claud Jarman is a boy who believes Hernandez is innocent.
Filmed in Oxford Mississippi, Faulkner's home town, Intruder in the Dust is far better than To Kill a Mockingbird.
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 am ET is Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954) with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, and Edgar Buchanan.
Film Noir Guide: "Ford is a Korean War veteran who returns to his stateside job as a train engineer. He becomes involved with Grahame, the wife of the railroad company's assistant train master (Crawford), after her jealous husband commits a vicious murder. Desperate to retrieve from Crawford an incriminating letter that can connect her to the killing, Grahame tries to convince ford to murder him. Buchanan (TV's Judge Roy Bean) play's Ford's friend and co-worker. A tawdry remake of Jean Renoir's provocative La Bete Humaine, which starred Simone Signoret, Human Desire is notable mainly for Grahame's solid performance as the abused wife."
A mediocre film by Lang in my opinion.
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