Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
Quicksand
A mechanic borrows twenty dollars from the till. The interest is everything he has.
Mickey Rooney, done with Andy Hardy and playing against every inch of him, is a garage mechanic who takes a twenty from the till for a date and spends the rest of the picture paying it back with worse and worse money. Irving Pichel builds the film like a ledger: every scene settles one debt by opening a bigger one, and the arithmetic is the suspense. Peter Lorre runs a penny arcade by the sea with a smile that charges by the minute. Count the sums as they rise. In seventy-nine minutes, twenty dollars becomes a car, a robbery and a man left for dead.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Irving Pichel
- Photographed by
- Lionel Lindon
- With
- Peter Lorre · Mickey Rooney · Barbara Bates · Taylor Holmes · Jeanne Cagney
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two pictures in which a few dollars are the whole of fate. Detour gets there by bad luck on the road, Quicksand by a bad choice at the till. Both end up nowhere near where they meant to go, and neither can find the way back to where they began.
Robert Smith wrote both for independents releasing through United Artists in 1950: one man ruined by small sums, another by small accidents. In each the trouble arrives in instalments, and the suspense is in counting them.