Elliot sighed. “If my parents are extolling Paul Goode’s noirishness, I’ll bet he’s awful,” the little English teacher said, “but if the film is being shown at noir festivals, it’ll show up around here.” Mr. Barlow was betting it would come to Cambridge—to the Brattle Theatre, an art-house cinema he knew from his familiarity with Harvard Square—but The Wrong Car came to the Franklin in Durham in 1960, four years after its lackluster theatrical release. Virtually no one had seen the film, save Nora and Em and the little Barlows. As for Susan Barlow’s prediction—that we were destined to see more of Paul Goode—it hadn’t happened. Not yet.

Careerwise, it didn’t bode well for Paul Goode that he was thirty when almost no one noticed him as the getaway driver in The Wrong Car. One winter night, my next-to-last year at Exeter, I drove to Durham, with the snowshoer riding shotgun beside me. In the backseat, my uncles were horsing around. In 1962, Elliot and I would see Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—a great noir film, melodramatic and funny (and not)—but Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were already laughing in anticipation of how funny The Wrong Car was going to be. It wasn’t. Not even Martin and Johan laughed. It was a bloodbath, a very repetitious one, but the getaway driver surprised us. No one thought Paul Goode looked much like the snowshoer. Yes, the actor was small and handsome, and although he was thirty, he looked twenty. Truly, he looked barely eighteen. For most of the film he wore an unflattering duckbill cap, a newsboy cap. His dark eyes were hard to see under that rounded flatcap, the brim at eyebrow level. The cap was a soiled herringbone pattern. Its eternal griminess suggested that the little driver slept under his getaway car.

What is noir about The Wrong Car, and about Paul Goode’s taciturn but smiling performance, is that the getaway car never gets away—only the driver escapes, to drive again. The car is a death trap, if this little guy is driving it. The third or fourth doomed getaway car made Uncle Martin question us in the Franklin. “Is the getaway driver a ghost?” he whispered.

“An Angel of Death!” Uncle Johan loudly exclaimed, frightening the moviegoers seated around us.

An über-noir touch, late in the movie, is a bimbo along for the ride—a moll, we would call her. One of the gangsters has a girlfriend, but whose girlfriend is she? As the gangsters pile into the getaway car, there’s no seat for the moll.

“Hey, what about me?” she asks.

“You gotta sit on someone’s lap,” one of the gangsters tells her.

“Not his lap,” a different gangster says to her, pointing to the little driver. “He’s gotta drive.”

“No, thanks,” the moll says, walking away. Before she goes, she takes a long look at the smiling driver.