Where the Sidewalk Ends
Directed by Otto PremingerNew York homicide detective Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) carries a reputation for brutality and a private war against the criminal class his own father once belonged to. When a routine investigation into a gambling syndicate run by the ruthless Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) leads to a confrontation with a suspect, Dixon strikes too hard and the man dies. The dead man is Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), a war veteran with a complicated past – and the estranged husband of Morgan Taylor (Gene Tierney), a woman Dixon has already begun to notice.
Desperate to conceal his role in Paine's death, Dixon stages the body to implicate Scalise, a move that satisfies his contempt for the gangster but implicates Morgan's father, the cabdriver Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully), who is arrested for the killing. As the investigation tightens under the supervision of Lt. Thomas (Karl Malden) and Dixon's partner Klein (Bert Freed), Dixon finds himself sustaining a deception that punishes an innocent man while protecting a career already corroded by violence. His developing feelings for Morgan sharpen the contradiction he cannot resolve.
Where the Sidewalk Ends uses the procedural architecture of the police thriller to conduct a sustained examination of institutional corruption from the inside. The film belongs to a mid-cycle strain of noir in which the protagonist is neither victim nor villain in any simple sense but rather both at once – a man whose pathologies have been given a badge and a license. Preminger holds the moral geometry steady without flinching, and the film's tension derives less from plot mechanics than from watching a man attempt, and repeatedly fail, to outrun his own character.
