Quicksand was sandwiched between Mick’s “sports films” which were made with the intention of changing his on screen persona as the perpetual kid from Carvel High by placing him in more mature roles. During this run Mick plays a boxer (Killer McCoy), race car driver (The Big Wheel) and a roller derby skater (Fireball). While all entertaining in there own right, it’s Quicksand that leaves little doubt that Mick has shook off the dust from the town of Carvel and the Hardy family home and entered the adult world. Quicksand served to pave the way for his foray in noir with subsequence films such as The Strip, Drive a Crooked Road, and Baby Face Nelson all released in the ‘50’s.


Quicksand is one of the most harrowing examples of film noir ever made, and also one of the more fascinating social documents of its era. Mickey Rooney (who financed this film with Peter Lorre and saw both his and Lorre's shares of the profits stolen by their third partner) gives the best performance of his career as a well-meaning but not too bright schlub who finds himself sinking ever deeper into a maze of theft and assault, and even murder. Director Irving Pichel shows a fine eye for detail in both the performances and the action. Much of the movie was shot in actual locations on the sleazy Southern California amusement piers where it was set; additionally, the characters in the film, especially the men, act and talk like real guys, not characters in a movie -- the dialogue and the banter, and even the way they stand and interact with each other, all feels real and harsh. One gets a vivid sense of the texture of working-class life during that period, long enough after World War II for fun and games, and an easygoing approach to life, but with an underlying unease reflecting the era of Korea, the Red Scare, and the uncertainty lying just below the surface of American life. Indeed, the nature of the story and the dark, shadowy treatment of so much of the action seems to be an unsettling commentary on the fragility of the stability of life, made even more compelling by the accepted optimism of the era.

A cautionary noir, Quicksand has the advantage of almost universal identification. We can all see ourselves following the same crooked path as Dan Brady. The quasi-downbeat ending doesn't simply let Dan off the hook, making for an unusually mature ending.