Drive a Crooked Road

I should say that "Drive a Crooked Road" probably won't hold your attention quite as much as most movies that I've seen. What's mostly eye-opening about it is just seeing Mickey Rooney in a gritty role in a film noir. He plays Eddie Shannon, a mechanic with little aim in life. The high points in his daily routine are when his co-workers ogle women walking by the shop. But when he gets mixed up with the wrong woman, he suddenly finds himself involved in a bank robbery with apparently no way out.

While some people might assert that Mickey Rooney was miscast here, I beg to differ. In this role, he shows that he can be something totally different from the "family-oriented" roles with which he's usually been associated (though I best remember him from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "Night at the Museum"). This movie is approximately as gritty as the average film noir, and while it's not any kind of masterpiece, still worth seeing. As it's apparently not widely available on video or DVD, Portland's video/DVD store Movie Madness has a copy.

Also starring Kevin McCarthy (of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers") and Jerry Paris (the neighbor on "The Dick Van Dyke Show").