Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

User Rating:

7.7/10   

Director:

Otto Preminger

Writers:

Ben Hecht (screenplay)
Victor Trivas (adaptation) ...

Release Date:

7 July 1950 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Film-Noir | Drama

Plot:

Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon wants to be something his old man wasn't: a guy on the right side of the law. But Dixon's vicious nature will get the better of him.

Plot Keywords:

Taxi Driver | Police Detective | New York City | Cover Up | Racketeer

Cast

Dana Andrews	...	Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon (16th Precinct)
Gene Tierney	...	Morgan Taylor(Paine)
Gary Merrill	...	Tommy Scalise
Bert Freed	...	Det. Sgt. Paul Klein (Dixon's partner)
Tom Tully	...	Jiggs Taylor, Morgan's Father
Karl Malden	...	Det. Lt. Thomas (16th Precinct Detectives commander)
Ruth Donnelly	...	Martha, Owner of Martha's Cafe
Craig Stevens	...	Ken Paine
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Herbert Lytton	...	Joe, Scalise Hood (scenes deleted)

Runtime:

95 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

Germany:12 | UK:12 | USA:Approved (MPAA rating: certificate #14458) | USA:Passed (National Board of Review) | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | West Germany:12

Filming Locations:

Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

Robert F. Simon's film debut.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Andrews is staging the murder scene after Stevens' death, he is gloveless. A few seconds later he suddenly has gloves on both hands.

Quotes:

[speaking to Dixon]
Tommy Scalise: That's a fancy way of trying to frame somebody- getting yourself knocked off. A guy's gotta be outta his head for that. I didn't know a guy could hate that much. Not even you.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in A Trip to Swadades (2008)

Preminger's grittier Big Apple tale fully the equal of his vaunted Laura

In Where The Sidewalk Ends, Otto Preminger reunites Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, surely in hopes of recapturing the magic of his Laura. But they're wildly dissimilar films, set in different strata of New York (not to mention at opposite poles of the noir universe). A fine mist of the Gothic hovers over the upscale Manhattan of Laura, with its erotic obsession and faint whiff of necrophilia; Where The Sidewalk Ends is pure urban soot and grit befouling a town of basement apartments, steam rooms and parking garages.

But it's every bit as fine a movie as its revered forerunner, and dyed-in-the-wool noir (Laura, by contrast, one of the clutch of films from 1944 which the French first dubbed `noir,' was still very much a sophisticated murder mystery). Daylight enters only on very temporary sufferance, and director of photography Joseph LaShelle makes the most of the alleys and brownstones, the docks and the El. This is quintessential big-city - specifically Big Apple - noir, like several others from the bumper crop of 1950, like Side Street and Sleeping City and The Tattooed Stranger and Edge of Doom.

As the movie opens, police detective Dana Andrews is on the carpet for his brutal ways, particularly his vendetta towards crime boss Gary Merrill (whom we learn was set up in business by Andrews' ne'er-do-well father). When an out-of-towner is stabbed to death at a floating crap game operated by Merrill, the hair-trigger Andrews roughs up a witness, causing him a fatal crack to the skull (exacerbated by a steel plate installed in the veteran's head). Realizing that his job's already on the line, Andrews dumps the body in the river after making it look like the suspect had taken a powder.

Of course, that's far from an end to it. The corpse is discovered, his estranged wife turns out to be Tierney, and all the evidence starts to turn toward her father (Tom Tully), a hack driver who happened not only to have been cruising the same mean streets the night of the murder but to have ample reason to want his abusive son-in-law dead. But the embittered loner Andrews finds in Tierney a summons to his better nature; he tries to exonerate her father while still keeping his own involvement in the whole sordid business a secret....

Not so epigrammatic as Laura, the script for Where The Sidewalk Ends (by Ben Hecht) shows a pungency of its own (in a second dressing-down, his superior tells Andrews, `Look at you - all bunged up like a barrelhouse fag').

But while Laura spread its attention over half a dozen characters, here Andrews is all but the sole focus (even Tierney's role is far less central than her half-spectral Laura). And Andrews may never have excelled his performance here. It's tight-lipped and taciturn, but never more eloquent than when his face is silently registering the anguish to which his own obstinacy has brought him. He's a pent-up sufferer who can find release only through the safety-valve of violence (he even lashes out against his loyal partner, Bert Freed). To be sure, he finds too swift a road to redemption though the agency of his beautiful co-star. But that was the style of the times, and a sweetened-up ending does little to undermine this New York story of violence, corruption and urban entanglements.