(1950)

Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Karl Malden, Craig Stevens dir: Otto Preminger

Dana Andrews had the looks - clean cut, clear-eyed and square jawed - that were perfect for postwar Organization Man. Machine-tooled, he looked ready to take his place as a cog in the military-industrial complex.

But his face had a worried cast that made him real in a way no comic book caricature could achieve. Shadows lurked behind those eyes as if, like so many returning G.I.s, he’d seen too much ‘over there’ and been changed forever. The complexity that this suggestion of darkness gave him made Dana Andrews an iconic figure - you can’t go too far in the noir, 40s ‘B’ and 50s thriller direction without running into him - and his sharp fedora.

Otto Preminger must have recognized this more than most, deploying Andrews four times over the years: first as a detective in the highly regarded Laura (‘44); then the pleasingly seedy Fallen Angel (‘45); this film, and much later In Harm’s Way (‘65). (Fritz Lang also caught on, with Dana [plus fedora] starring in his mid-50s thrillers Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and While The City Sleeps.)

But Sidewalk is 180 degrees from the polished society pages sheen of Laura. The title tells us this, though it specifically alludes to mobster Merrill’s taunt to Andrews’ character Mark Dixon: "Why are you always trying to push me in the gutter? I have as much right on the sidewalk as you". Dixon is a prototype Dirty Harry, a detective who runs down crims with a zeal that doesn’t let niceties such as the rules or law get in his way, and is just as offside with top brass as with the underworld.

Visuals carry the weight here with an integrity comparable to Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night. The murky soup that is Sidewalk’s moral landscape is unmistakably reflected in the impossibly grainy texture of Mark Dixon’s world; it’s like smog indoors. And when, having crossed a line, Dana’s perfectly chiseled jaw is aesthetically marred by a huge, awkwardly placed sticking plaster, his wounds simply become as externalised as Jack Nicholson’s did in Chinatown (after the nosejob).

We’re let in on the internal nature of the wounds early, when it’s revealed that Dixon’s zeal is fuelled by the stigma of his father’s corruption, instantly intertwining self-loathing, purification and self-justification as the motivating forces in the detective’s over the top anti-crime crusade.

"Laura, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where The Sidewalk Ends, and his RKO loanout, Angel Face, are all moodily fluid studies in perverse psychology rather than crackling suspense movies", said auterist critic Andrew Sarris. But students of the human condition are likely to find Sidewalk as rivetting and memorable as any dark character study, and since the criminal outcome is directly linked to Dixon’s internal struggle, it will be uniquely satisfying to thriller fans as well.

History-as-fate is an eternal theme in film noir (qv. Out Of The Past, et al) but no other film presses on with such a compelling Oedipal drive as this one, and the extra depth this gives it, combined with its extraordinary texture, makes Where The Sidewalk Ends one of the great overlooked classics of its genre.