A Film Canon

The greatest elaboration of Manhattan as a noir cityscape, Where The Sidewalk Ends extrapolates an entire world from the fine line between pavement and gutter, as well as from the blurry distinction between detective Mark Dixon's (Dana Andrews) criminal heritage, and his increasingly questionable tactics, culminating with his manslaughter of a suspect, and subsequent attempt to prevent blame falling on the estranged wife's (Gene Tierney) father. Not only does this clarify the noir procedural as an extended self- interrogation - beautifully paired with Andrews' cerebral, introspective masculinity - but it provides Preminger and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle with the pretext for a series of spectacular on-location sequences, all of which partake of a slippery, liminal quality that finds its logical conclusion in a subtle proliferation of elevators, as well as in the lurking presence of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is sufficiently abstracted to transform every space that it overshadows into an expansive gutter, thereby imbuing Mark's decline with the grim, ironic fatality that ensures that his very attempts to forestall it are what fulfil it. The result is an idiosyncratic inversion of Laura, and, more specifically, of its use of noir to delineate the outermost co-ordinates of decadence, such that every display of privilege - most notably Tierney's Washington Heights home, presumably neighbouring that of Andrews' ex- lover in the earlier film - takes on the character of a remote outpost, transforming topography into topology, and producing one noir's most shadowed, nocturnal mindscapes.