From 1937 to 1946,
Mickey Rooney
played clean-cut, wide-eyed Midwestern teenager Andy Hardy 15 times in a
series of films that proved instrumental (along with his Judy Garland
musicals) in making him one of the most popular movie stars of his era.
They also surely came to feel like a gilded prison around the actor. By
the time the series ended, the Hardy character had been to WWII and back
(as had Rooney), yet still seemed incapable of getting past first base
with a girl (whereas Rooney was already on the second of his eight
marriages).
The Mickster’s thirst for more adult roles was palpable, and
Hollywood took a few different stabs at figuring out what to do with
him. There was a series of sports films designed to show off the
five-foot-two actor’s virile, athletic side: the boxing drama “Killer
McCoy” (1947), in which he is a highly improbable light heavyweight; the
car-racing programmer “The Big Wheel” (1949); and “The Fireball”
(1950), about a champion roller skater. But Rooney would prove a far
better fit for the seedy, downtrodden world of film noir: He gave two of
his best performances in a pair of unjustly overlooked classics of the
genre.
Rooney had come to noir via the 1950 “Quicksand,” a taut,
independently made thriller (which he partly financed along with his
co-star, Peter Lorre) in which he stars as a naive auto mechanic whose
seemingly innocuous theft of $20 from the store cash register snowballs
into a series of increasingly violent and dangerous criminal acts.
Several degrees greater, however, is 1954’s “Drive a Crooked Road,”
where Rooney is once again a mechanic, this time seduced by a gangster’s
sultry moll (Dianne Foster) into serving as the getaway driver for a
Palm Springs bank heist. The movie’s ad copy — “Why Would a Dame Like
Her Go for a Guy Like Me?”— effectively summed it up. Expertly directed
by Richard Quine (a frequent Rooney collaborator) from a crackling
script by the young Blake Edwards, “Drive” turns on Rooney’s diminutive
stature and equally deflated sense of self, casting him as a decent but
self-loathing loner who allows himself to be duped by Foster’s
transparent charms — and it reveals a darkness in the actor that no
movie quite had before.
Darker still is “Baby Face Nelson” (1957), directed by the great Don
Siegel (“Dirty Harry”) and featuring Rooney as the eponymous John
Dillinger associate, known for his trigger-happy ways and massive
Napoleon complex. It is an unsparing, startlingly violent film that in
many ways anticipates “Bonnie and Clyde” by a decade (unsurprisingly,
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther panned it, too), and Rooney is
absolutely terrifying in it: shifty, seething with rage against the
world, primed to explode. Siegel’s film is rarely screened today and has
never been released on any homevideo format; Rooney’s death makes its
revival seem all the more urgent.
After “Baby Face Nelson,” Rooney veered back to more likable movie
roles, but on TV he had one more unqualified triumph in the pit of
despair. In “The Comedian” (1957), directed live by John Frankenheimer
for the anthology series “Playhouse 90,” he is Sammy Hogarth, a
vituperative TV comic who spews invective at all who surround him, not
least his long-suffering brother/assistant (Mel Torme). “Don’t make me
the heavy all the time!” Hogarth bellows in one of his rants. Rooney
only occasionally got to play the heavy, but when he did, he was rarely
more brilliant.
Photo: Post-WWII, the actor stretched in 1954’s “Drive a Crooked Road.”
