Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

Drive a Crooked Road (1954) is a sap-for-a-sucker lonely guy motor car film noir starring Mickey Rooney as a jingle-brained mark who is beguiled into driving the getaway car in a heist.

Mechanic and race car driver Eddie Shannon is the sap in question, played by Mickey Rooney. He's great with cars, and can think about little else, and is a proficient driver — although in top-drawer film noir fashion, he lives his lonely life on a single bed, next to a chest of drawers covered in trophies, the only one of which we can read being inscribed with the award of having come Second Place.

At work Eddie is bullied, both for his height — this is Mickey Rooney after all, and everyone in the film, even his super-attractive girlfriend played by Diane Foster, is taller than him.

But there are deeper issues than this with Eddie. At work, in the garage, where he is a whizz with the motors, Eddie does not take part in the other mechanics' other main occupation, which is the voyeuristic and chosen and male-gazing objectification of women.

As the garage is below street level, this is a regular occurrence and when a woman walks by, the men rush from their bench to make wolf-whistle, hubba-hubba noises, and other grunts of approval. This sexual objectification for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer, does not appeal to Eddie, who stays on the bench every time this happens — leading one of his colleagues not just to cast aspersions on his sexuality, but to up the general bullying tone.

Motor Car Noir in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

Eddie however only has eyes for the motor cars, and while this love is strong it cannot hide the main chance — Drive a Crooked Road (1954) is a film about loneliness, and Eddie's loneliness, brilliantly captured by the vulnerable Mickey Rooney is front and centre and creates an emotional impact which keeps Drive a Crooked Road (1954) powering along, making it a film noir with an emotional centre. 

Eddie attracts the eye of some suave bank robbers and becomes their mark, and they begin to scheme to pull him in on their heist. The heist requires someone with Eddie's ability to soup up engines and drive at high speeds over treacherous roads, to avoid capture after they pull the job. 

Eddie (Mickey Rooney) does not partake of the hubba-hubba in
Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

To bait the driver into the dangerous scheme comes the centre-point of everything that happens in Drive a Crooked Road (1954) and one of the robbers uses his girlfriend, Barbara Mathews, to help persuade Eddie to assist with the crime. 

Although Eddie's share of the heist would also make it possible for him to achieve his dream of racing competitively in Europe, the money alone wouldn't be sufficient inducement, and so a fake courtship begins, and Barbara (Dianne Foster) makes her move and begins dating him.

Mickey Rooney and Diane Foster in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

As it says on the 1954 poster for the movie: Why would a dame like her go for a guy like me?

It is in fact a pertinent question because Barbara is not just out Eddie's league, but Eddie himself seems only able to talk about cars on his dates, and is not in any way prepared for romance. He likes to race, and he likes engines, but he has clearly never been under the hood in any relationship, as testified to by the lonely bed on which he resides. 

Mickey Rooney and Diane Foster in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

Eddie is also a moral and upright guy, and herein lies another film noir trope — Drive a Crooked Road (1954) presents a descent and is the story of a male who against everything he knows is right, commits himself to doing a wrong, for the sake of a women who does not even love him.

Insofar as Barbara is a femme fatale, she is a different breed from the 1940s type. Barbara presents as a nice girl, although she is the girlfriend of slick and attractive middle-class bank robber Steve Norris, played by Kevin McCarthy. She doesn't appear lingering in a doorway in black dress, flashing lustful and world-weary eyes at the males frozen in desire for her.

Male-ieanation for the 1950s
Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

On the contrary she is a femme fatale for the 1950s — presenting as demure even, polite and submissive, when in fact she is a part of a larger scheme, being used by her boyfriend to fool the sap, and make a heel out of Eddie.  

Barbara increasingly feels ashamed of leading Eddie on, and develops some feelings for him. This leads to his discovery of the way he's been used, triggering a deadly confrontation at the end.

It's the way that Eddie is sustained by the dream of love that makes Drive a Crooked Road (1954) a fascinating film noir. The inevitability of it all places us on solid noir territory, and with a nice twist, the criminal gang are middle-class, hosting pleasant beach-house parties and swanning on the sands, rather than inhabiting the basements and backrooms of the urban centres. 

Eddie’s life story and his deep-lying bitterness is written in a large scar which runs vertically down his face. The scar is the result of a crash during a race and is something of a barrier between Eddie and the world — not just cutting him off from love but contributing to the workplace bullying he undergoes.

When Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) turns up at his garage however and asks for him personally to fix her car, his exterior shield against the world begins to fail. 

Mickey Rooney in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

The script is careful to show that the way Eddie responds to the world is due to the scar which actually seems to bisect his face — but this scar is the result of his own obsession with racing and his consequent desire to prove himself better than others. As a weakened male noir hero, his ego has created the fatal flaw that makes him vulnerable to the plan to exploit him.

There are more flaws than just Eddie's — and Barbara's bad-girl conscience and sudden histrionics as her heart softens to the poor sap she has been deluding is what leads to the failure of the scheme and the deadly conclusion. 

Kevin McCarthy as the middle class career criminal in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

The subject of motor-car noir is deep — encompassing sociological, cultural and narrative elements that could fill books. One of the primary elements of the importance of the automobile in the 1940s and beyond is the sudden-found freedom that personal vehicles allow. However on top of this there is the danger of death, and the uses of the car for crime — something which is write large across all noir heist and other crime movies.

The amount of scenes however that take place in automobiles across film noir in general is staggering — so it is great to see a film noir production that places the automobile at front and centre — as instrument of danger — instrument of crime — as dramatic location for conversation, kidnap and romance — and as the inanimate object of a man's obsession — a love strong enough to compete with the very notion of romantic love with a woman. 

Jack Kelly in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

While the family home in film noir is the pre-eminent space for safety and the realisation of the American Dream, the car too reflects stability and becomes a dramatic aspect of narrative and of being itself. Richard Quine, director of Drive A Crooked Road (1954) as well his studio, would have been aware at least of the importance of the motor car to the movies' new and fast growing demographic also — the teenager — although Drive A Crooked Road (1954) does not stack up fully as a teen movie, with most of the interest being romantic, and Mickey Rooney himself ageing past his normative youthful movie-featuring self.

The automobile as a setting for drama is a fascinating concept. In a sense the occupants of cars are invisible, and so in film noir all sorts goes on in there — the commission of crime including murder — a deal of fighting — the best example of this being an incredible in-vehicle fist-fight between Beverley Michaels and Van Heflin in East Side, West Side (1949). Inside of the vehicle is a great place for romance, and it's impossible to begin to list all the covert, ultra-romantic and erotically charged encounters which take placed within the cocooned vehicles of noir. 

Cars also engender excitement, and technological pursuit across landscapes urban and rural — do see White Heat (1949) to see the full force of the law pitted against some car-bound criminality both in the city and across the land. In Drive a Crooked Road (1954) there is a further element of excitement with the addition of motor racing, and a high speed drive across a wild desert road. 

Motor Car Noir in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

What is also apparent is that the motor car is a point of contradiction. There is all round visibility from within this shell, which is both safe and dangerous, secret and public, a way you will be exposed but also one of the great tools of crime. So much of noir relies on the automobile to power its story — whether it be the road rage of In A Lonely Place (1950) or the randomness of the thrown suitcase of money which kicks off Too Late For Tears (1949).

All this high speed invulnerability and adventure, along with romance is a potent mix. Marion Crane in Psycho (1960) is more linked to her automobiles — she drives two of them and memorably switches cars in the middle of the film — than any viewer consciously realises. The way the policeman's face invades the safety and privacy of her car, is one of the most memorable images of the movie. 

Cry into your pillow in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

More sociologically speaking it is a pleasure to study film noir drivers as extensions of the objects they control — consider Humphrey Bogart's unconscious and then conscious murders in Conflict (1945). If there were an argument to be made for the automobile to be an extension of a person's consciousness as well as their manhood — that could be it — as readily as it is in Drive a Crooked Road (1954).

The private exclusion and isolationism of the car is highly pronounced after World War II, largely because of the design elements which came into play at the time. The car is a sign of personal autonomy by this stage, and rapidly becomes a fixture of the American Dream — although not a fixture that is prominent in the way that marriage, the kitchen, the Christmas tree and the family home are. Prosperity is in fact manifest in the symbol of the car, and even more so in the garage.

In Drive a Crooked Road (1954) the middle-class criminals are in exactly this mode, for they have a garage, and it is in this garage attached to their beach house, that the engine of their getaway car is made into something criminally powerful. The magic and power of the car as symbol here, is a celebration in fact of nothing less than winning the war — the war which halted the production of cars in fact.

Privacy and mobility are perfect from criminality in fact, which means that the motor car probably features as a key item in the film noir productions of the golden era. In one of the best examples of the style, Double Indemnity (1944), the murder is committed within the vehicle in a quite terrifying manner — terrifying because the patriarch is exposed as being unsafe in his very own vehicle, and moreover, the  hierarchy of the front seat is overthrown when Walter Neff arises from the dark behind the driver’s seat to strangle Mr. Dietrichson as his wife, watches.

Jack Kelly and Mickey Rooney in Drive A Crooked Road (1954)

In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), it's the young wife played by Lana Turner in the driving seat, with her older husband (Cecil Kellaway) in the passenger seat fully aware of the drifter-employee, Frank Chambers (John Garfield), in the backseat — yet not aware of the conspiracy between the two others. The secret relationship is in fact intensified by the characters being inside the vehicle, due to eye movements, and proximity. The lovers try and frame the automobile for the murder in fact — pushing it over a cliff after their murder. 

Impact (1949) is one of the most interesting motor-car noirs, also, for several reasons — including the almost gender-bending love interest of Ella Raines who turns up as a mechanic after the motor car has caused mayhem and death, interrupting a murder with a set of lost keys and a hasty exit, and a fatal collision — and all this after the two men involved have got to know each other on the road, in the comfortable and ensconced seats of a car.

Cut off from the world — vulnerable and safe — unsafe and invulnerable — the characters of film noir interact a huge amount with their cars. The resulting drama in Drive a Crooked Road (1954) is bleak, and sleazy when it needs to be. The middle class criminals are a revelation, but for motor-car-noir, this is a seminal seminar on loneliness and as a theme this is a mighty powerful and emotional look at heartache and withdrawal.

Loneliness is a great film noir theme. Drive a Crooked Road (1954) is dark and sad and has a gloomy conclusion, and as often in noir, the robbery is a complete success but it is the crooks who do themselves in with their personal reactions to the crime. Jack Kelly plays a hood for whom violence and deceit seem great fun. Mickey Rooney in his 30s adopts this role perfectly, being teased about his lack of sexual experience, tossing helplessly on his rooming house bed as he tries to balance the idea of crime and the fact that he might have for once in his life managed to find a perfect woman.

The cruelty is palpable, and the noir is noisome. He's a dupe, a heel, a sap, a victim — and Drive a Crooked Road (1954) is a beautifully balanced taste of 1950s film noir insofar as this dark ritual of the humiliation of the lonely has  a fascinating quality. 

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