Is there anybody meaner than Lawrence Tierney on the screen? Sure, James Cagney was a bad-ass, shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy or knocking Virginia Mayo off a chair in White Heat. And Bogart could be equally cold-blooded in films like The Petrified Forest and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But Tierney is like a rabid dog in comparison, sparing no one, not even himself, from violent death, and The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) is a perfect example of his menacing screen persona.
It all starts innocently enough. Jimmy, a drunken conventioneer (Ted North), makes the mistake of picking up Steve (Lawrence Tierney), a hitchhiker who has just robbed and murdered a theater manager. Along their way up the California coast, they soon stop to take on two female hitchhikers; one a tough, calculating blonde (Betty Lawford), the other, a naive girl with show biz aspirations (Nan Leslie). When a motorcycle cop tries to stop them for questioning, Steve almost succeeds in crushing him with their car, which sets in motion a frantic manhunt for the unlucky foursome. By this point, Jimmy realizes the terrible predicament he is in. But the situation becomes even more desperate once the fugitives take refuge in an isolated beach house where Steve becomes increasingly paranoid and violent.
Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lulu became the basis for David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), sings the praises of Lawrence Tierney in his book of film reviews, The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films: “This is one of the meanest, most boldly deranged exercises in maniacal behavior this side of Farmer Ed Gein, minus the dismemberment….Tierney invests this basically stupid plot with such genuine virulence that Devil must be ranked in the upper echelon of indelibly American noir.”
Two thumbs up on that. This might be Tierney’s most terrifying performance – it almost verges on being a horror film – and ranks right up there with his iconic role as Dillinger (1945), the film that launched his career as a leading man in B pictures, and his equally vicious portrayal of an uncontrollable murderer in Robert Wise’s Born to Kill (1947).
At the same time, The Devil Thumbs a Ride occasionally reveals an offbeat sense of humor. Ted North’s clueless twit of a protagonist makes one dumb mistake after another which turns the first half of the film into a dark comedy of errors. Betty Lawford’s peroxide blonde tramp is also so transparent and gleefully wicked that she seems like a bad girl caricature. Even Tierney is amusing at times as pointed out by noir expert/author/Turner Classic Movies host Eddie Muller in a review:”…Feist fully captured Tierney’s dangerous combination of ribald humor, sinister charm and hair-trigger volatility and violence. Feist’s willingness to juxtapose comedy ‘relief’ with moments of startling cruelty was unheard of at the time; the mix of sardonic humor and casual sadism wouldn’t be equaled until 1952, when Jim Thompson published The Killer Inside Me…”
In an interview for Psychotronic Magazine, Tierney recalled little about the making of The Devil Thumbs a Ride but he did add, “A lot of people like that. I got along with (director) Felix Feist, he was a nice guy. Very talented, a good sense of humor. We used to play gin rummy. I’d beat him most of the time and he got upset because he considered himself a great gin rummy player.”
In another interview, Tierney admitted he didn’t personally care for The Devil Thumbs a Ride at all. “I never thought of myself as that kind of guy,” he said. “I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn’t do rotten things. But obviously that miserable son of a bitch in the film would! I hated that character so much, but I had to do it for the picture.” Yet, to hear Tierney complain about playing a villain like Steve is almost laughable.
Within Hollywood circles, Tierney’s infamous reputation for boozing and brawling was just as unapologetic as the onscreen characters he played. Before he was dropped from his RKO contract, he became a publicist’s nightmare with his numerous scrapes with the law; he was charged with breaking a man’s jaw, kicking a police officer, and arrested numerous times for drunken and disorderly conduct.
After completing Best of the Badmen, his last RKO feature, Tierney made national headlines when he created a major disturbance that sent him, bound in straps on a gurney, to a psychiatric hospital. Although he continued to make films on a sporadic basis, his alcoholic rages continued to end in police court with jail sentences, culminating in a notorious 1975 incident where he was suspected of pushing a female drinking companion to her death.
Eventually, Tierney sought help through Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, and graduated from appearing in strictly low-budget fare to starring in more mainstream features like Gloria (1980), Arthur (1981), The Naked Gun (1988), and Reservoir Dogs (1992), directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Reservoir Dogs was instrumental in reviving Tierney’s career as a cult figure from the film noir era and he worked steadily for another seven years, appearing in TV movies (1993’s Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story) and series (L.A. Law, ER, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and bit parts in high profile films like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Armageddon (1998). He was even voice talent on an episode of The Simpsons, which is a testament to his pop culture fame. Unfortunately, Tierney suffered several strokes in his final years and died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles nursing home in 2002 at age 82.
A few words of praise are also in order for Felix E. Feist, the writer-director of The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Often overlooked and underrated, Feist became a master of his craft at MGM where he helmed a number of short subjects in such popular film franchises as Crime Does Not Pay, The Passing Parade and the Pete Smith Specialties. He made an auspicious feature film debut in 1933 with Deluge, an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller, but would later emerge as a first rate film noir specialist starting with The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Feist would follow this with other key contributions to the genre such as The Threat (1949), The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) starring Ruth Roman and Steve Cochran as fugitives on the run, and This Woman is Dangerous (1952) featuring Joan Crawford as the brains behind a criminal organization. After years of being neglected by critics and cinephiles, Feist (who died in 1965) finally received a retrospective honoring his best work in 2029 at Il Cinema Ritrovato, the annual international film festival in Bologna, Italy that programs new restorations and archival prints.
Due to rights issues, The Devil Thumbs a Ride has been unavailable for years but it has popped up on Turner Classic Movies in the past. Reputedly the Library of Congress and the Noir Foundation collaborated on a new restoration of the film recently but it still remains unavailable for public screenings.
*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.
Other links of interest:
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2019/03/my-dinner-with-lawrence-tierney-part-2.html
http://toddmecklem.com/tierney.html
Cinema Sojourns 