Where the Sidewalk Ends

Otto Preminger (Laura, Fallen Angel) directs and Dana Andrews gives a standout performance in this moody, menacing noir; Chris Fujiwara, author of the recent The World and its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, calls Where the Sidewalk Ends “one of Preminger’s great films on obsession and anguish.” Andrews is compulsive, belligerent Mark Dixon, a New York City cop with a history of brutality. In the course of an investigation, he kills a suspect, and then covers up the crime. Dixon seeks to implicate a mobster in the death, but suspicion falls instead on an innocent cabbie. Thing gets more complicated — and more desperate — when Dixon becomes romantically involved with the cabbie’s daughter (played by Laura’s Gene Tierney). Celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (Scarface, His Girl Friday, Notorious) wrote the script. Tierney’s then-husband, fashion designer Oleg Cassini (who later designed for Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1960s), did the costumes and has a cameo. “A weatherbeaten Andrews gives one of his finest performances . . . Preminger’s superior noir boasts hard-boiled and sardonic dialogue, courtesy of Hecht, but also a surprising strain of pathos as Dixon fights against his own nature” (Geoffrey McNab, Time Out). B&W, 35mm. 95 mins.