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The opening titles zero in on the second-place racing trophy on a nightstand, pointing up the link to Ludwig's The Big Wheel. The mechanic (Mickey Rooney) "lives alone and hates it," runty and scarred and so dispirited when it comes to the opposite sex that he barely moves a muscle while his garage pals whistle at comely passersby. Le Mans is the dream, a pretty gal's attention is as elusive, and yet there's the gorgeous customer (Dianne Foster) inviting him over to Malibu Beach. "Money, money, money. It's the old problem, isn't it," sighs her accomplice (Kevin McCarthy), twenty miles of treacherous road stand between him and freedom after a bank robbery. The grease monkey makes for an adroit getaway driver, which elucidates the unexpected romance with the remorseful moll: "We had to hook you and hook you good, and I was just the little girl for the job." An exceptionally sharp Blake Edwards blueprint, from which Richard Quine extracts a beautifully low-key picture of Palm Springs and the lonesome desert under its asphalt. The protagonist is an awkward square who lies back in his tiny flat and dreamily sniffs the handkerchief he filched from the lady's glove compartment, "never had a toothache in my life, not even a filling," Rooney gives him pockets of suspicion and melancholia in a taut job of underplaying. The dash across dusty curves is carefully studied in a projection room ("How many times can you look at this? Movies must be better than ever"), and reworked by Siegel in The Killers. Meanwhile, the pain of betrayal gradually weighs on the heroine: "Everything seems to be out of shape, soiled," everybody's story. The car on the shore reappears soon enough in Bob le Flambeur. With Jack Kelly, Harry Landers, Jerry Paris, Paul Picerni, and Dick Crockett. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |