Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Why you always trying to push me in the gutter? I got as much right on the sidewalk as you do.” There’s something unusually quiet about Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends: the sobriety of Dana Andrews’ personality, relatively slow pace, ambient score, intimate studio sets, overcast lighting, the watcher in the window. In fact, there’s a certain quietude and dream-like quality to all of Preminger’s noirs, especially his first and more famous pairing of Andrews and Gene Tierney six years earlier (Laura, 1944), and here again from the first frame as the opening credits appear with no musical score aside from a brief whistling of Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene.” Already on probation for roughing up too many suspects, bitter cop Mark Dixon (Andrews) accidentally kills Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) while questioning him, so he hides the body and concocts an alibi for himself. Now called on to investigate his own crime (a compelling premise shared with The Man Who Cheated Himself released the same year), Dixon forms a bond with the victim’s gorgeous, estranged wife Morgan Taylor (Tierney), but the relationship is based on a lie, especially after circumstantial evidence makes Morgan’s easygoing father, taxi driver Jiggs (Tom Tully), the primary suspect for Dixon’s crime. Gary Merrill plays crime boss Tommy Scalisi, who will come to blows with Dixon before all is said and done. LaShelle paints with bars of light that turn a variety of sets (the precinct building, the attorney’s office) into metaphorical prison cells, while the lonely, urban atmosphere creeps across every stoop and down every alley as if night were a criminal accomplice.