The two directors with the longest-running guerrilla wars with the censors and their Motion Picture Code were both refugees from Hitler: Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger,*

The 1950 rogue policeman melodrama "Where the Sidewalk Ends" seems to me to have been particularly maimed by censorship imposing an unplifting ending (lifting the protagonist out of the noir world in which he operated).

Detective Sergeant Mark Dixon (Preminger noir regular Dana Andrews) is reprimanded at the start of the movie for multiple complaints that he used excess force (that is, beat up suspects and witnesses). The commissioner (or a NYPD captain?) attempts to remind him that his job is to arrest suspects, not to try and punish them and warns him that if complaints continue, Mark will be back in uniform. The warning does not take. If it did there would be no movie. (Cops who are not straight arrows have become commonplace in movies, but were scarce in Hollywood movies ca. 1950, so this angle looked—and was—daring at the time in ways it's impossible to recapture now.)

Thomas (Karl Malden), who started out in the same class as Dixon, is promoted to lieutenant and becomes Mark's boss. Thomas knows how to maintain appearances, and his own torturing of a witness is done offscreen.

Mark has had a long vendetta against Tommy Scalise (a smirking Gary Merrill), a gang leader who runs a high-stakes crapgame (and, no doubt, other rackets). I don't want to reveal the complicated plot. For that matter, I am not certain who does the deed to produce the first corpse (probably one of Scalise's goons rather than Scalise).

There is a romance between Mark and Morgan Taylor (another Preminger regular, Gene Tierney, looking not as drop-dead gorgeous as in "Laura"), a wrongly accused man, major-league police cover-up, resentful loyalty between partners (Bert Freed plays Mark's), and a clever noir final confrontation (before the corny uplifting ending I have already noted). And there is a pre-Freudian challenge to the doomed-by-genetics views of the "naturalistic" era (without getting into the full view of everyone living in cesspools of later 1950s noirs).

Performances

Andrews was good as the devious upholder of law and order (a role closer to his turn in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt than to the policeman he played in Preminger's "Laura"). Tierney seems to have phoned in her performance or to have been on drugs. (There was always something "not entirely there" about Tierney; Preminger used this in "Laura" and "Whirlpool," but in "Sidewalks," she is playing a more conventional good daughter role). Malden and Freed and Merrill are good, as are the various goons who work for Scalise and the shifty involuntary informant (Craig Stevens, I think).

I have some difficulty believing that Andrews's punch is so effective. Not just in this regard, Robert Ryan (who was taller as well as having been a college boxer) would have been better... but Andrews (and Tierney) were Fox contract players. Preminger liked both of them and worked with both of them on other films, including the greatest hit of his Fox noir years, "Laura."

Noir look

The milieu of the movie and the vigilante policeman justify inclusion of "Where the Sidewalk Ends" in the "Fox Noir" series. Preminger had the services of one of the best noir cinematographers, Joseph LaShelle, who had won an Oscar for shooting "Laura," and also had shot Fallen Angel (with Andrews again) for Preminger, plus "Hangover Square, "Bachelor Party," The Outcasts of Poker Flats," etc. LaShelle went on to shoot 1960s Billy Wilder movies (The Apartment, Irma la Douce, The Fortune Cookie, Kiss Me, Stupid). The lighting is stark, but there are not lots of flashy shots of looming shadows or staircases. The noirish look of the movie is in the parking garage, particularly its lift and operating mechanism. (Big machinery was a staple for noir confrontation scenes) and in the cramped quarters of a rooming-house room, the hotel room where the crapgame (and murder) took place, and in the office of the parking garage.

Music

I seems that there was not a score for the movie (though Samuel J. Mockrdige receives a credit for it; what a name!). Music from the 1931 movie "Street Scene," composed by Alfred Newman was used over and over, starting with the opening credits. (That movie was made by Samuel Goldwyn, not Fox.)

DVD

The Fox Noir series has been notable for providing excellent transfers (whether of pristine negatives or restorations, I'm not sure) with commentaries by noir experts. Eddie Muller, who also did the commentary track on The House on Telegraph Hill, is very knowledgeable, very opinionated, and very entertaining. He seems to wear down a bit, though it could be argued that the last part of the movie has more to stimulate comment directly about what is on the screen. However, what he says is not very analytic (dare I say "stating the obvious"?). Still, the first part of the commentary track is entertaining.

The DVD also offers English subtitles, the movie's trailer, and bios of Preminger and writer (adapter) Ben Hecht. (Plus imaginatively hard-boiled chapter titles.)

* Both were protégés of Ernst Lubitch, who hit the Hollywood ground running, Preminger played a Nazi prison camp commandant in Wilder's "Stalag 17. Both became producer/directors after the Hollywood studio era. A melancholy parallel between their careers is that after censorship crumbled, neither knew what to do. They were adept at getting things by the censors, but once freedom was won, they didn't know what to do. This seems to be to parallel the cases of a number of dissident writers within the Soviet Empire: when it collapsed they didn't know what to do without an authority to defy and get around.

©2006, Stephen O. Murray



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