Where the Sidewalk Ends
This week’s film noir is Where the Sidewalk Ends, released in 1950 by Twentieth Century Fox, directed by Otto Preminger, and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. This movie isn’t very well known. It isn’t cited on any shortlists of the best or most characteristic noir films, and it’s not on video. But I have a strong personal liking for it, and it seems to me that it exactly is one of the best and most characteristic examples of noir.
In the first place, there’s the title. On another of these programs I was talking a bit about film noir titles—how deliberately metaphorical and pulp-poetic so many of them are, how much they’re intended to evoke the noir mood. There’s no better example than Where the Sidewalk Ends, a wonderfully evocative phrase for a movie title, so unlikely and yet so precise as an image. The credit sequence takes the form of lettering on a sidewalk, over which the camera tracks, and it ends, well, Where the Sidewalk Ends, tracking off the edge and into the slimy gutter. The story later talks indirectly about whether people are in the gutter or on the sidewalk—and that too is just a way of emphasising the same metaphor, of distinguishing morally between the saved and the damned.
The movie’s protagonist is Dana Andrews—a cop named Dixon, who has a kind of pre-Dirty Harry reputation as being overly violent. Dixon kills a sleazy character more or less accidentally in the midst of a homicide investigation and then tries to cover up the fact and pin the death on the mobster he’s been obsessively trying to get. Already this is a very interesting scenario, because it departs so decisively from the standard model of good cops and bad criminals—or for that matter from the simple inversion of that model into good criminals and bad cops. Here the cop is a bad guy at least to some extent—he commits crimes, he acts like a criminal—and he’s the hero, the guy we’re meant to sympathize and identify with. He’s a cop who beats people up, he’s a cop who covers up his misdeeds, and as the story moves on he’s more and more clearly a cop being devoured by his internal neuroses.
But although at first it looks as though the movie is simply saying that cops ought not to behave the way Dixon does here, in the end things turn out to be more complicated. When all the returns are in, it transpires that the most important results the police get come when the goody-goody by-the-book cops start to act more violent, more like Dixon. The movie is explicit in its comparisons between the way cops behave routinely and the way criminals behave, and it’s a development that seriously undermines any basic moral certainties on which both society and most Hollywood movies are built.
The cop is played by Dana Andrews, a Fox contract star who had already worked with Otto Preminger in a couple of other movies which we’ve seen in this series: Laura and Fallen Angel. In Laura he was also a cop—and more than one commentator has remarked that not the least disturbing aspect of Where the Sidewalk Ends is the idea it almost depicts the cop from Laura a couple of years down the line, now deeply embittered and internally twisted. Dana Andrews, a kind of middle-rank star of the period, who’s pretty much forgotten nowadays, has always seemed a very interesting performer to me. It’s the combination of rock-hard impassiveness in his face and voice with the suggestion of inner torment, the tough-guy certainty and egotism sitting next to terrible self-doubt and weakness. All these qualities make him, really, the ideal protagonist of film noir. As the movie’s story gets more and more tortuous, and the forces tearing at Dixon come closer and closer to the surface, we see that it’s not just present circumstances that have put him in a jam—it’s his whole history, his whole past. What he’s struggling against and trying to escape is something like fate.
As in Laura, the woman in the case is the dazzling Gene Tierney, but she’s not nearly such a central character this time. Although in some of her films, notably the splendid melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, she could play wicked destroyers of men, it’s significant that none of her roles in actual film noir projects shows her in this way. She’s pretty much the only female interest in Where the Sidewalk Ends, and her role is to radiate dewy, heartfelt sympathy towards every man she’s close to—Dixon, her falsely accused father, and even her nasty wife-beating ex-husband. No spider-woman here.
The screenplay is by Ben Hecht, one of the strongest and most distinguished of all Hollywood scriptwriters, whose impressive list of credits includes the invention of the gangster film back in 1929 and a whole range of striking and intelligent projects in the twenty years between then and Where the Sidewalk Ends. The script for this movie is full of nice little moments, with a particularly good ear for the tough dialogue of the criminal classes and their pursuers.
Then there’s Preminger’s wonderfully fluid and stylish direction. Although there are more closeups and crosscutting here than in most of his films, there’s still the lovely little symphony of camera movements and the smoothly atmospheric photography he gets from cameraman Joseph LaShelle. As in all of Preminger’s noir projects, this sense of fluidity goes beautifully with the subjectivity and interiority of the drama. The camera glides through the story like thoughts or feelings gliding through the mind. Instead of being punchy and kinetic like standard crime movies, the film is hypnotic and evocative. Of course you could say the same thing for a lot of film noir, but it’s particularly true in Preminger’s case. At the same time there’s plenty of room for the almost documentary-like registration of the sights and sounds of city streets at night, gritty and specific locations of all kinds. Altogether it’s a style finely suited to film noir.
Where the Sidewalk Ends might be the most noir of all Preminger’s projects, because of its profound distortion of moral boundaries, its destabilizing presentation of a guilty man in a position of institutional authority, its nightmarish sense of the need to conceal and pretend and to live a lie. And visually, there are many scenes that could go straight into the noir encyclopedia. In the end, like so many anguished noir films, it reaches for the romantic opposite of redemption, it tries to bring moral transfiguration out of pain and guilt—and the results, at least in my opinion, are expressive and moving.
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Where the Sidewalk Ends is admirable in the way it plunges pell-mell into the noir situation. First we have Dixon reprimanded for another case of police brutality, and reacting to the reprimand and a reduction in rank with bitterness and a total lack of repentence. In 1950 this is already a disturbing situation. There’s no tradition of open rebellion against authority, no Dirty Harry-like branding of the whole institution of law-enforcement as incompetent and hypocritical and self-servingly bureaucratic—and no depiction of society as desperately needing some tough rules-breaking cop whose violent natural sense of justice can be put into practise without the time-wasting nonsense of due process. That kind of right-wing populism didn’t arrive until much later. When, in this movie, people refer to Dixon as “the man who hates crooks” and “the law that works by itself,” it’s not a hidden compliment—it points to somebody who’s out of control. And in the end, of course, this violent behaviour of Dixon’s is identified with his “criminal blood,” inherited from his father and coming out instinctively even as he’s trying to be a good cop.
Anyway, as I said, this violent malcontent, this criminal who’s a cop, is already a noir situation for viewers in 1950 unless the movie is planning to disavow the hero entirely, make him entirely into a villain—which it’s not doing. But the events that follow these very early scenes have that quality of almost paranoid fatefulness that’s so characteristic of the most extreme forms of noir. No sooner has Dixon been told to lay off the manhandling or else be busted back to patrolling a beat than he accidentally kills somebody by hitting him. He didn’t intend to kill the guy, he didn’t even particularly want to hit him on this occasion, but coming right after the reprimand it looks as if he’s simply back to his old tricks, only with much much worse consequences. The pattern of a hero who’s really innocent but who looks inescapably guilty is familiar from lots of noir movies. Here it’s doubly powerful because in fact it’s really only an accident that this time it wasn’t his fault—9 times out of 10 it would have been. This doubling of the hero and the guilty man is then further emphasized by having him act exactly like a guilty man—covering up, deceiving, lying.
The way the dead guy gets transformed is even more noir. We only get to see him in two little scenes. In the first one he behaves like a total creep to beautiful Gene Tierney and finally hits her, labelling him once and for all as a complete low-life. Then, in his death-scene, he’s drunk and obnoxious. Well, it looks bad for Dixon that this guy should have died under questioning, but it’s not like it’s any great loss to the human species. We don’t really care that he gets killed any more than Dixon does, except that it looks bad for Dixon. But then these wonderful things keep happening. First of all he turns out to be a decorated war-hero—a lovely reversal of movie clichés which state that decorated war-heroes are exclusively good guys. He was also a syndicated columnist for awhile—educated and articulate. And then it turns out he wasn’t just dating Gene Tierney but was actually married to her, and that she felt sorry for him and kept trying to help him—and he was driven to drink and bad company by the inability to get a job. The dreamlike transformation is complete: he started out as a dispensable scumbag and, presto!, now he’s a valuable human being. And the more respectable this guy gets, the worse it is for Dixon, the more like a nightmare. When the hidden goodness of somebody’s character is bad news for you, you know you’re in trouble.
Ultimately what happens in this movie is that what starts off as a set of external circumstances—Dixon’s problem with a corpse and a murder investigation—just keeps getting more and more internalized and psychological as events march on. At the end the real battle isn’t between Dixon and the criminals, or between Dixon and the cops who might expose him, but only between Dixon and himself. The whole action of the movie is revealed retrospectively as a kind of symptom of Dixon’s internal struggle with his own inherent neurotic compulsions. And when the screen is filled by Dana Andrews’s anguished face, or by the intensified drama of the noir photography, it’s that internal conflict that’s made visible. Pure noir.