WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950) ...trouble begins, noir-turally

Otto Preminger directed four noir films at Fox, all terrific. Setting aside the peerless LAURA as more psychological mystery-romance than noir, there's plenty of evidence for judging WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS the best of the lot (the other two being FALLEN ANGEL and WHIRLPOOL). This is a hard-edged tale of a borderline-vicious New York police detective, Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews), with tortuous personal reasons for overzealousness in pursuing the bad guys. Much of the story unfolds in one night, when the murder of a high-roller from out of town precipitates a string of events that lead to Dixon's becoming an accidental murderer. True to noir tradition, an innocent man is implicated, and Dixon's moral and psychological torment kicks in. Tightly scripted by Ben Hecht, who provided noir scripts for many directors, Preminger's film isn't up to the quality of Nicholas Ray's ON DANGEROUS GROUND, another 1950 noir about a cop (Robert Ryan) addicted to ultraviolence, but it's first-rate. Tight-lipped and taciturn, Andrews is a sort older and rougher version of the cop he played in LAURA. In fact he's reunited with his co-star from LAURA, Gene Tierney, who plays a woman caught in the sidewash of sordid goings-on, and LAURA cameraman Joseph La Shelle, whose gives the film a luster beyond the accustomed semidocumentary look of Fox noirs. Gary Merrill, usually a bland nice-guy, chews scenery as as Dixon's nasty gangland foe Tommy Scalise, a homoerotic villain with a menthol inhaler as fetish object. Their encounters are brutal and fun to watch. The ending is pure Hollywood, but with a nice noirish twist.