Mickey Rooney wears an unidentified watch

A garage mechanic in postwar Los Angeles borrows twenty dollars from the till to take a girl out, certain he can slip it back before the shortage is found. Dan Brady never gets the chance. To cover the twenty he walks into a jeweler, puts a single dollar down on a hundred-dollar wristwatch on a signed installment contract, then carries it straight to a pawnshop and takes thirty for it. That is the whole engine of Irving Pichel's Quicksand (1950): a man pawns a watch he still owes ninety-nine dollars on, and the hole only widens. The twenty becomes a mugging, then blackmail by the man who runs the Santa Monica penny arcade, then $3,610 stolen from that same arcade, and at last a telephone cord around his boss's neck. The watch is not set dressing. It is the first domino.

The watch never shows clearly enough to read a dial, so its maker stays unknown. That suits a film that cares about the watch for its hundred-dollar price and its thirty-dollar pawn value, not its name. It is the sort of plain dress watch a jeweler in 1950 would sell to a working man on a dollar down, and its only job in the story is to turn one signature into thirty dollars of someone else's money.

Mickey Rooney plays Brady at twenty-nine, a decade past the run from 1939 to 1941 when exhibitors voted him the number-one box-office draw in the country, mostly on the strength of the Andy Hardy pictures. His MGM contract was over by then, and Quicksand, an independent picture from Samuel H. Stiefel Productions released through United Artists, is the sort of low-budget noir he took in its place. Jeanne Cagney, James Cagney's younger sister, plays Vera Novak, the diner blonde Brady is spending the stolen money on, and Peter Lorre runs the arcade and tightens the screws once Brady is in deep. The spiral starts because a young man cannot afford the watch he buys, and never gets to keep it.