Quicksand

Dan Brady is a young mechanic at a garage. He takes twenty dollars from the till to go out with a woman, meaning to put it back on payday. The bookkeeper turns up earlier than expected. To cover the gap he buys a watch on credit and sells it, and that goes wrong too. Then he takes a man's wallet, then a car, then a gun. At every step he does something bigger to cover the last thing. What began with twenty dollars reaches a far heavier crime within a few days. Irving Pichel directs the American film; seventy-nine minutes, with Mickey Rooney as Brady, Jeanne Cagney as the woman, and Peter Lorre as the man who runs the amusement pier. Rooney was known as a child actor; this belongs to the period when he was moving into adult parts. The film is short, fast, and about how there is no way back out of one wrong move.