Quicksand (1950)

Irving Pichel, Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre · 1950 · 79 min

Mickey Rooney borrows twenty dollars from the till fully intending to put it back, and the film is a patient demonstration of how that becomes something much worse by increments. Rooney is very good in it, the boyish energy turned frantic and cornered. Peter Lorre runs an arcade and enjoys knowing things about people. A small film about compound interest on one bad decision, and one of the few noirs where the hero's stupidity feels entirely plausible.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item Quicksand_clear — 1.09 GB MPEG-2 · 640×480 · 79.0 min ✓.

Culled: A scene-tagged x264 DVDRip that slipped the automated filter (which only knew x265 — gap now closed in the notes).

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and a curation pass. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Watched end to end and confirmed on 2026-08-22 (owner eye-pass): runtime, intact titles, no watermarks or overlays, no colorization or crop, audio in sync.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1950 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1977 (first half of the window) contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The 1978 half of the window lives in the post-1977 online records; that search is the named remaining verification step. The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.