1949 was not a good year for Peter Lorre. In 1942 he left a highly successful tenure at Warner Brothers to set up Lorre Inc with Sam Stiefel; by 1949 he was bankrupt and cursing Stiefel’s name to anyone who would listen. His film work was drying up too, partly, Lorre suspected, because he’d been unofficially blacklisted due to his ties to left wing playwright Bertolt Brecht. He was mainly picking up work doing recitals on radio and acting on TV, a medium he loathed. It was a gruelling schedule, made worse by his dependency on morphine. Lorre had battled addiction from his twenties when he was given morphine to relieve a burst appendix. By 1947 he was desperate enough to attempt insulin and shock therapy treatment, damaging both physically and mentally. Neither worked. All was not well in his home life either. His wife Karen Verne, bored, insecure and guilt ridden over a son she had left behind in Europe turned to drink and made several suicide attempts. One might have expected the Peter Lorre who turned up on the set of Irving Pitchel’s Quicksand to have been somewhat depressed, but far from it. According to fellow actor Jeanne Cagney he was very jolly, both with him and the film’s main star, Mickey Rooney, making an inspiring double act off-screen. His performance, however, tells a different story.
The film concerns the antics of one Dan Brady (Mickey Rooney), a cocky auto mechanic whose attempts to impress materialistic femme fatale Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney) lead him to make a series of disastrous financial decisions which push him into increasingly desperate criminal acts. The film's ‘crime doesn’t pay’ morality is a little hard to swallow at points and the happyish ending is contrived, but its seaside amusements setting is atmospheric, and the performances are all solid. Rooney, usually associated with comedy musicals, delivers an energetic edgy performance worthy of note. But it's Lorre’s performance as Nick, the depressed and bitter penny arcade owner, that steals the film. We first meet Nick when Vera takes Dan to the arcade to flaunt their relationship in front of Nick, with whom she clearly has history. When she provocatively spins round and says, “Hello Nick!” we get a close-up of his response, or lack of it. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth and replies: “Oh it’s you”. His expression is blank, and his voice is full of profound weariness, he is clearly fed up with Vera and, possibly life itself.
Lorre was a masterful screen actor, especially of the close-up, his face capable of casting various minute twitches of expression in rapid succession. Here he barely moves a muscle, yet the despondent feeling that radiates from his blank face and the resigned way he says “Oh it’s you” hits as hard as any of his more animated performances. He brings this same lack of energy and enthusiasm to a fight scene between him and Dan, who seems to be moving at twice the speed of Nick during the tussle. At the end of the fight Lorre is sat in the shadows beaten. He wipes himself clean with a blood-stained handkerchief which he realises incriminates Dan for a mugging he committed earlier. Again, his face remains virtually blank and yet he conveys a sense of sadness, fatigue and scheming calculation all at the same time. It’s almost as if the sadness is permanently etched into his face; as if he couldn’t dispel it even if he wanted to.
Lorre has two other scenes in the film; one where Nick blackmails Dan into stealing a car for him, and another where they exchange the stolen car keys for the incriminating handkerchief. Both scenes see more range from Lorre. The blackmail scene see Nick relaxed and dominant for the first time in the film as he idly toys with Dan, holding up a stolen $50 note to his ear and ‘listening’ to what it tells him as he whispers the name of the man Dan robbed it from. The exchange of the keys is closer to comedy, showing a little of the off-screen warmth the actors clearly shared, but always Lorre brings a jaded sorrow to the proceedings which dominates the scenes. The film shows a wind change in Lorre’s acting which wasn’t picked up on at the time, but you can see the development of this less dynamic, emotionally sincere persona given its fullest expression in his next film, his ill-fated, self-directed German production The Lost One (Der Verlorene, 1951). Over the years critics have come to regard his performance in that film as one of his greatest achievements, praising it for its very personal form of naturalism. Ultimately, Lorre’s was a tragic life and career, a world class actor who, arguably, never fulfilled his potential but none the less used his talents to create some of the most memorable character roles of Hollywood’s Golden age, not to mention his unforgettable performance in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece, M (1931). Quicksand is a key moment in his artistic development, where he strove to make a performance uniquely honest and uniquely his own.
Sandy Milroy.
View movie at: https://archive.org/details/quicksand.-1950.-dvdrip.x-264-handjob
