The movie’s ad copy - “Why Would a Dame Like Her Go for a Guy Like Me?”- effectively summed it up. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). ![]() ![]() They also surely came to feel like a gilded prison around the actor. 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.
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