Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) - film review

New York detective Mark Dixon has a reputation for brutality when it comes to dealing with criminals and his boss warns him that unless he changes his ways he can expect a demotion.  Called to a hotel room where a man has been stabbed to death, Dixon runs up against an old enemy, the mobster Tommy Scalise.  Convinced that Scalise is implicated, Dixon goes after the key witness to the killing – a man named Ken Payne – only to knock him dead in a brawl.  Having disposed of Payne’s body, Dixon contrives to pin his death on Scalise, but things do not go quite as planned.  First he falls in love with Payne’s ex-wife Morgan, and then the police begin to suspect that Payne was killed by Morgan’s father.  As his world collapses around him, Dixon realises he still has one last chance to bring Scalise to book...

Where the Sidewalk Ends was the last in a series of films that director Otto Preminger made under contract with Twentieth Century Fox in the 1940s.  It is a quintessential film noir, furnished with all of the familiar noir motifs – cynical cops sparring with tough gangsters, gambling rooms draped with beautiful women, and an unmistakable stench of masculine existentialist angst.  The taut, well-constructed screenplay was by the prolific Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had previously collaborated with Preminger on an earlier film noir Whirlpool (1946).

The film is typical of late 1940s, early 1950s American film noir in that it marked a dramatic change in the way in which the detective hero is portrayed.  Here we see the emergence of the maverick cop, the morally ambiguous anti-hero who was more than willing to step outside the law in order to dispense his own peculiar notion of justice.  Prior to this, the good guy-bad guy demarcation was pretty clearly defined – by and large, cops were good, hoodlums were bad.  Subsequently, this neat separation of role types would become less and less noticeable and would vanish altogether, often with the criminals taking the moral high ground as the cops became more ruthless in their determination to win.

The subject and style of this kind of film noir would appeal immensely to French film directors – most notably Jean-Pierre Melville – and would have a significant impact on the development of the policier genre in French cinema throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  Where the Sidewalk Ends is very evocative of the early French policiers, with its hazy delineation between police and mobsters, its bleak neon-lit urban setting, its no-holds-barred brutality and absence of a well-defined moral compass.

Where the Sidewalk Ends brought together a formidable acting team, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, who had previously starred in Preminger’s earlier, Laura (1944), a very different kind of film noir.   In one of his best performances, Andrews is convincing and likeable as the taciturn cop whose determination to prove himself drives him to the point of self-destructive psychosis.   Mark Dixon is an unusually complex character for this kind of film, and much of the film’s appeal is that some thought has gone into rationalising the motivation for his behaviour, rather than just pass him off as a cop who just likes abusing his power, as happened in many subsequent crime dramas.

© James Travers 2008

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?