An Arizona hiker got trapped Saturday in quicksand in a creek at Utah’s Zion National Park, and the rescue — complicated by a snow storm — dragged into Sunday, according to park rangers. Oobleck is a classic science experiment that's perfect for entertaining both kids and adults. If you haven't seen it in action it's very fascinating stuff and before too long you'll have your hands covered with it, happily making a mess that can be washed away with water.
Quicksand | |
---|---|
Directed by | Irving Pichel |
Produced by | Mort Briskin |
Screenplay by | Robert Smith |
Starring | |
Music by | Louis Gruenberg |
Cinematography | Lionel Lindon |
Edited by | Walter Thompson |
Samuel H. Stiefel Productions | |
Distributed by | United Artists |
| |
79 minutes | |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
![Quicksand deaths youtube Quicksand deaths youtube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t0SaVJBsBQM/maxresdefault.jpg)
Quicksand is a 1950 American film noir. It is a crime film starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre. It is a story about a garage mechanic's descent into crime. It was directed by Irving Pichel shortly before he was included in the Hollywood blacklist (which was instituted by the House Un-American Activities Committee to block screenwriters with suspected Communist affiliation from obtaining employment). This film was a chance for Rooney to play against type in a role that differentiated him from his starring role in the nice guy Andy Hardy film series.[1]
Plot[edit]
Mickey Rooney as Dan Brady
Peter Lorre as Nick
Dan Brady (Mickey Rooney), a young auto mechanic in California, takes $20 ($202 in 2017) from a cash register at work to go on a date with blonde femme fatale Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney).[2] Brady intends to put the money back before it is missed, but the garage's bookkeeper shows up earlier than scheduled. As Brady scrambles to cover evidence of his petty theft, he quickly finds himself drawn into an ever-worsening 'quicksand' of crime, each of his misdeeds more serious than the last.
He buys a $100 wristwatch ($1,011 in 2017) on installment payments and then promptly pawns the watch for $30 cash ($303 in 2017), covering the missing funds from the register at work. However, Brady is then threatened with grand larceny for violating the installment contract by selling a watch that he doesn't legally own. The finance company demands payment in full for the watch within 24 hours. After unsuccessfully applying for a payday loan and attempting to use his car as collateral for another loan, a desperate Brady resorts to mugging a tipsy bar patron known for carrying large amounts of cash.
Nick Dramoshag (Peter Lorre), the seedy owner of a penny arcade on Santa Monica Pier and a man who has had his own intimate history with Vera, discovers evidence of Brady's mugging. He blackmails the young mechanic, demanding a car from Brady's job in exchange for his silence. Brady steals the car, which he trades for the evidence from Dramoshag. However, Brady's morally lacking boss Oren Mackey (Art Smith) confronts Brady with allegations that he was witnessed stealing the car. Mackey demands the return of the car or $3,000 in cash ($30,324 in 2017), or he will go to the police.
Brady and Vera steal the month-end receipts from Dramoshag's arcade, obtaining $3,610 ($36,490 in 2017). Brady expects to use the money to pay Mackey. Vera, however, feels entitled to half the money, so she buys herself a mink coat for $1,800 ($18,124 in 2017). Once Brady learns what she has done, he is furious. He leaves Vera and returns to the garage, where he offers Mackey $1,800 to settle their arrangement. Mackey takes the money, but he draws a pistol and says he refuses to settle. The two men struggle when Mackey tries to telephone the police, and Brady strangles him in their altercation. Certain that his boss is dead, Brady takes Mackey's gun and returns to Vera to inform her of what he has done. He asks her to flee with him to Texas. She will not go, insisting that the authorities have no evidence against her. Disgusted by Vera's self-serving behavior, Dan ends their relationship and departs.
Outside of Vera's apartment, Brady's still-loyal but unappreciated former girlfriend Helen (Barbara Bates) waits in his car to talk with him. She had seen him earlier on the street and realized then that he was in trouble. She now decides to accompany 'Danny' as they drive out of town to avoid his anticipated arrest for murder. After his car breaks down, Brady carjacks a sedan, which happens to be driven by a sympathetic lawyer (Taylor Holmes). Brady subsequently gets out of that car when they arrive at Santa Monica Pier. There he tells Helen to remain with the lawyer as he carries out his new plan to escape to Mexico on a friend's charter boat. He also assures Helen that he will send for her once he is safely resettled across the border. Brady rushes away to catch the boat. A few minutes later, the lawyer and Helen hear over the sedan's radio a news report that Mackey is actually not dead, that the shady auto dealer had survived his injuries. They now drive back to the pier to find Dan and inform him that he is not a murderer. Meanwhile, police officers spot Brady there, wound him by gunfire in an ensuing chase, and take him into custody. The film concludes with Helen, now on the scene, comforting Dan and promising to wait for him until he is released from prison.
Cast[edit]
- Mickey Rooney as Dan
- Jeanne Cagney as Vera
- Barbara Bates as Helen
- Peter Lorre as Nick
- Taylor Holmes as Harvey
- Art Smith as Mackey
- Wally Cassell as Chuck
- Richard Lane as Lt. Nelson
- Patsy O'Connora as Millie
- John Gallaudet as Moriarity
- Minerva Urecal as Landlady
- Sidney Marionas as Shorty
- Jimmie Dodd as Buzz (as Jimmy Dodd)
- Lester Dorr as Baldy
- Kitty O'Neil as Madame Zaronga
- A young Jack Elam, later widely noted as a character actor in Westerns, appears in a small uncredited speaking role.
Production[edit]
Rooney co-financed Quicksand with Peter Lorre, but their shares of the profits were reportedly left unpaid by a third partner.[3] Most of the film was shot on location in Santa Monica, California, with exterior scenes at the old Santa Monica Pier. Jazz cornetist Red Nichols with His Five Pennies group are seen and heard in a nightclub scene.
Peter Lorre's fellow actors in Quicksand were impressed with his performances on the set. Commenting on the film in a later interview, Jeanne Cagney observed the following about Lorre: 'He did it with all his might. Even though the picture was not a top drawer film he still approached it as if it were the 'A' picture of all 'A' pictures.'[4]
The composer of the musical score for Quicksand, Russian-born Louis Gruenberg, was a great lover of American jazz and a close friend of the renowned Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. When hired to work on the film, both Gruenberg and director Irving Pichel were already under congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as its searched to identify and expose Communists and any of their sympathizers in the movie industry, labor unions, journalism, and in many other areas of American society. Rooney and Lorre, by financing the production of Quicksand themselves, had the power to give their beleaguered colleagues much-needed opportunities to be employed and to share their creative talents. Despite Rooney and Lorre's efforts to help the composer and director, Gruenberg and Pichel soon vanished from Hollywood.
Reception[edit]
Bruce Eder of Allmovie wrote Rooney '...gives what many consider to be the best performance of his career' and characterized Quicksand as 'one of the more fascinating social documents of its era.'[3] Fifty years after the film's first theatrical release DVD Savant wrote, 'the quasi-downbeat ending of Quicksand doesn't simply let [the protagonist] off the hook, [which] makes for an unusually mature ending.'[1]
References[edit]
- ^ abdvdtalk.com, DVD Savant - Quicksand, November 17, 2000. Accessed: July 20, 2013.
- ^For the plot description of Quicksand on this page, all monetary adjustments for inflation between 1950 and 2017 are based on Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures calculated and provided by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, Washington, D.C. Accessed March 26, 2017.
- ^ abEder, Bruce. AllRovi. Film review. Accessed: July 20, 2013.
- ^Burnett, Peter. Film noir reviews, Quicksand (1950). Jeanne Cagney's quotation in Burnett's review is drawn from and attributed to Stephen D. Youngkin's biography The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. ISBN0-8131-2360-7. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
External links[edit]
- Quicksand on IMDb
- Quicksand at AllMovie
- Quicksand at the TCM Movie Database
- Quicksand at the American Film Institute Catalog
- Quicksand informational site and DVD review at DVD Beaver (includes images)
- Quicksand is available for free download at the Internet Archive
- Quicksand complete film on YouTube (public domain)
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quicksand_(1950_film)&oldid=912742116'
Quicksand and a warning sign about it at a gravel quarry in England
Quicksand is a colloidhydrogel consisting of fine granular material (such as sand, silt or clay), and water.
Quicksand forms in saturated loose sand when the sand is suddenly agitated. When water in the sand cannot escape, it creates a liquefied soil that loses strength and cannot support weight. Quicksand can form in standing water or in upwards flowing water (as from an artesian spring). In the case of upwards flowing water, forces oppose the force of gravity and suspend the soil particles.
The saturated sediment may appear quite solid until a sudden change in pressure or shock initiates liquefaction. This causes the sand to form a suspension and lose strength. The cushioning of water gives quicksand, and other liquefied sediments, a spongy, fluid-like texture. Objects in liquefied sand sink to the level at which the weight of the object is equal to the weight of the displaced soil/water mix and the submerged object floats due to its buoyancy.
Liquefaction is a special case of quicksand. In this case, sudden earthquake forces immediately increase the pore pressure of shallow groundwater. The saturated liquefied soil loses strength, causing buildings or other objects on that surface to sink.
Properties[edit]
Quicksand warning sign near Lower King Bridge, Western Australia
![Vandellas Vandellas](https://img.youtube.com/vi/_dG-J9HuM2Q/0.jpg)
Quicksand may be found on riverbanks, near lakes, in marshes, or near coastal areas.[citation needed]
Quicksand is a shear thinningnon-Newtonian fluid: when undisturbed, it often appears to be solid ('gel' form), but a less than 1% change in the stress on the quicksand will cause a sudden decrease in its viscosity ('sol' form). After an initial disturbance—such as a person attempting to walk on it—the water and sand in the quicksand separate and dense regions of sand sediment form; it is because of the formation of these high volume fraction regions that the viscosity of the quicksand seems to decrease suddenly. Someone stepping on it will start to sink. To move within the quicksand, a person or object must apply sufficient pressure on the compacted sand to re-introduce enough water to liquefy it. The forces required to do this are quite large: to remove a foot from quicksand at a speed of 0.01 m/s would require the same amount of force as needed to lift a car.[1]
A human is unlikely to sink entirely into quicksand due to the higher density of the fluid (assuming the quicksand is on dry ground and not under water, but even if underwater, sinking is still improbable). Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per milliliter, whereas the density of the human body is only about 1 gram per milliliter. At that level of density, sinking beyond about waist height in quicksand is impossible. Even objects with a higher density than quicksand will float on it if stationary. Aluminum, for example, has a density of about 2.7 grams per milliliter, but a piece of aluminum will float on top of quicksand until motion causes the sand to liquefy.[2]
Continued or panicked movement, however, may cause a person to sink further in the quicksand. Since this increasingly impairs movement, it can lead to a situation where other factors such as weather exposure, dehydration, hypothermia, tides or predators may harm a trapped person.[3]
Quicksand may be escaped by slow movement of the legs in order to increase viscosity of the fluid, and rotation of the body so as to float in the supine position (lying horizontally with the face and torso facing up).[2]
In popular culture[edit]
Quicksand is a trope of adventure fiction, particularly in film, where it is typically and unrealistically depicted with a suction effect that causes people or animals that walk into it to sink and risk drowning. According to a 2010 article by Slate, this gimmick had its heyday in the 1960s, when almost 3% of all films[where?] showed characters sinking in clay, mud, or sand.[4] American television programs of that era portrayed the perils of quicksand in a similar fashion. In a 1963 episode of the Western television program The Rifleman, for example, two teens are portrayed venturing into a swamp and sinking in quicksand up to their necks, frantically yelling for help until rescued.[5] The lead character in the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode 'The Jar' (based on a story by Ray Bradbury) finds himself in a similar, quicksand-induced bind.[6]
See also[edit]
- Sapric (a soil of very decomposed organic material)
References[edit]
- ^Khaldoun, A., E. Eiser, G. H. Wegdam, and Daniel Bonn. 2005. 'Rheology: Liquefaction of quicksand under stress.'Nature 437 (29 Sept.): 635. doi:10.1038/437635a
- ^ abBakalar, Nicholas (September 28, 2005). 'Quicksand Science: Why It Traps, How to Escape'. National Geographic News. Retrieved October 9, 2011.
- ^Discovery Channel. MythBusters. Season 2. 'Killer Quicksand.' October 20, 2004.
- ^Engber, Daniel (23 August 2010). 'Terra Infirma: The rise and fall of quicksand'. Slate. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
- ^'Old Tony (Episode #168)'. The Rifleman. Levy-Gardner-Laven Productions. April 8, 1963. Retrieved August 30, 2018.
- ^IMDb, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–1965), 'The Jar' (Season 2, Episode 17, first aired February 14, 1964
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Quicksand. |
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Quicksand |
- 'What is quicksand?'. Scientific American.
- Video showing quicksand in a sandpit YouTube
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quicksand&oldid=913651060'