Word: rooney
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...COURTS OF MEMORY (507 pp.)-Frank Rooney-Vanguard...
...Courts of Memory sits its characters down at the banquet board of life, and gradually changes it into an operating table. Written by a 40-year-old short-story writer named Frank Rooney, it is among the year's best first novels-until it bogs down in psychological probings. Author Rooney's two basic themes: 1) parents v. children; 2) the lost and/or silent generation in search of a code to live...
Drive a Crooked Road (Columbia). The awkward age for most boys was the golden age for Mickey Rooney. But like most prodigies, one of the most talented child actors of modern times has had to pay for his precocity. At 24, he found himself a has-been-the public would no longer believe that he was a boy and was bored by the suggestion that he was a man. In the last five years, Mickey has made seven pictures, in each of which he seemed less and less the Hardy perennial...
...news of Drive a Crooked Road is in the evidence it gives that Actor Rooney is still a skilled actor. He plays a grease monkey who drives racing cars on the side, a lovelorn little beagle who trots adoringly after the first pretty girl (Dianne Foster) who ever gave him a pat. He finds out too late-sucker's luck -that she has led him into a plot to rob a bank. Mickey drives the getaway car, but discovers at the other end of the crooked road he has taken that the girl he thought...
Like most Hollywood melodramas of the seamy side, Drive a Crooked Road is competently made, i.e., it efficiently machine-stitches the moviegoer's emotions. Rooney plays his fall guy straight down the middle as a decent, unsmart joe who has the usual worries of a man shorter than most of the girls, with the result that he catches the audience's sympathy and holds it even to an improbable end. It is a modest but genuine triumph of self-restrained playing, and suggests that Mickey might well develop from a fine instinctive performer into a keenly conscious...