Where the Sidewalk Ends

Otto Preminger reassembled the Laura team here: the same director and the same two leads, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. The film deliberately drops Laura's elegance. Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay. Mark Dixon is a homicide detective prone to violence, driving himself because his father was a criminal. During an interrogation he accidentally kills a witness, panics and hides the evidence. He then falls for the dead man's ex-wife, and when the body surfaces the crime lands on an innocent man, her father. Dixon must either confess and lose everything or say nothing and become precisely what his father was. The script went through repeated rewrites to satisfy the censors. Preminger was expert at working around the Hays Office, and here he lets a killer both escape clear punishment and get the woman. Who it is for: viewers who want noir at its darkest, where the man enforcing the law is the one breaking it. Who it is not for: anyone needing a sympathetic lead. Dixon is a dangerous man at the start and at the end, and the film does not fully absolve him.