Drive a Crooked Road

Sometimes a femme fatale has a change of heart. In Richard Quine’s Drive a Crooked Road, Dianne Foster plays a beautiful beachcomber who does just that: her character Barbara Mathews seduces awkward, unattractive car mechanic Eddie Shannon (a cherubic, scar-faced Mickey Rooney) so he’ll drive the getaway car for a bank robbery in Palm Springs, but as the pathetic little guy falls more deeply in love, she comes to regret her participation in the scam (“You don’t think much of yourself, do you?” she asks him). Kevin McCarthy plays Barbara’s real boyfriend, Steve Norris, the clean-cut ringleader of the criminal enterprise, and Jack Kelly plays his number two Harry Baker, whose primary role seems to be making wisecracks. The manipulative setup is cruel, but Rooney’s performance is so packed with pathos (“when an ugly little guy like that gets hooked”) that the gang’s treatment of him becomes downright monstrous. For a noir, the film isn’t action-driven or even suspense-driven; in fact, the first hour is as much romantic drama as crime story, Eddie’s resistance to — and fear of — his own urges (in one garage shot, Eddie’s oil can is unmistakably phallic) giving way to acceptance, comfort, and love, strung along by Barbara’s convincing portrayal of a woman developing feelings (Foster deserves special credit for performing as a woman performing). Wrapped with an expressive (and admittedly repetitive) score by George Duning, the film emphasizes contrast not only of morals but of milieu: Steve and Harry lounge about and host parties in a Malibu beach house while Eddie toils as a grease monkey (one might expect his garage co-workers to break out in “Greased Lightning!” at any moment), returning to his tiny dump of a room at night, its drab, gray walls relieved only by his collection of racing trophies and a tiny pot of flowers he picks daily from the beds in front of his building.