WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950)

“One false move and you’re in over your head”

I tend to steer clear of prestige noir — there just isn’t much new to say about such films, and more often than not they wrap up in too neat a package. But in revisiting Where the Sidewalk Ends after a two-decade hiatus, I discovered a far better picture than I remembered — surprisingly post-modern in its depiction of a murky gray world where it’s difficult to tell right from wrong, with characters neither entirely good nor entirely bad, for whom just getting by is all that can be rightfully hoped for. In Dana Andrews’s detective Mark Dixon I found a man wracked by the human imperfections that compel us to watch film noir, deeply flawed yet nurturing a private hope that somewhere, somehow, in some unexplored place out beyond the neon signs and the never-ending warren of streets, there might be a chance at grace, at a better kind of life. Through the course of the film, Dixon comes to finally understand what such a chance demands of a man, and he gives it.

Any way you look at it, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a plum of a movie. Released by Fox in that most noirish of years, 1950, it reteams director Otto Preminger with stars Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, the key players from the 1944 hit Laura. And while a comparison of the two films would make for a meaty essay in its own right, here I’ll just note that while Laura, with it’s shakier claim at noir status, is concerned with human weakness in the New York glamour set, Where the Sidewalk Ends presents a more frightening — and far more exhilarating — version of the big city. The tall buildings, bright lights, and chic glamour of Laura are present, but seem forever lost in the distance, seen only through grimy windows, over dilapidated fences, and through the fog of a city beginning to devour itself. 

The world Preminger depicts here is bleak and gritty, strewn with trash, where predators lurk around the next street corner, and hopelessness blights each back alley. It’s a night-world, as different from the previous Preminger-Andrews project Fallen Angel as it is from Laura. Look in the window of a cheap basement flat and you’ll find Mrs. Tribaum, sleeping the years away at her kitchen table, longing for death to remember her address. Hail a taxi and you’ll meet Jiggs Taylor, who dreams that his fares are dignitaries to be shuttled from one party to the next, so beaten down by a dreary existence that he has trouble separating reality from fantasy, and worships the cop who once used his cab to chase down a petty thief. That clean-cut guy with the dice? That’s Kenneth Paine, an ex-war hero who took off his uniform only to discover that there weren’t any jobs after all, no matter what they said in the Stars and Stripes. Now he’s a degenerate gambler who drinks and smacks his wife.

And then there’s the cop. Where the Sidewalk Ends serves up one of film noir’s most finely drawn anti-heroes. Dana Andrews is hard-boiled detective Mark Dixon, enigmatic poster boy for loneliness and alienation. Like many other noir protagonists, Dixon can’t escape his past. He is further complicated by the fact that he isn’t responsible for his past, though he’s borne the burden of it since childhood. The blame lies instead with his father, a lifelong felon gunned down while attempting to blast his way out of Sing Sing. Now, neither the crooks he encounters nor his fellow officers will let him forget that he’s “Sandy Dixon’s son.” And it holds true that, as life often reminds us, the abused eventually become abusers. Empowered by a badge, the relentlessly beaten little boy is now a frayed insomniac obsessed with strong-arming criminals, unhinged by his desire to revenge himself on his long-dead father. Dixon craves violence, and even begs his boss for permission to beat a confession out of a suspect. The film’s opening finds Dixon getting dressed down for yet another string of brutality complaints. If he can’t reign in his temper, he’ll be fired; for now he’s forced to accept a demotion. And to make things worse, he’s saddled with a new straight-arrow precinct commander, Lieutenant Thomas (Karl Malden). On this night however, fate is only beginning to vex Dixon, whose life is about to spin out of control.

Ben Hecht’s masterful screenplay uses a one-two punch of critical early scenes from which uncoil all of the film’s drama. The first takes place in a swanky midtown hotel room, where Mr. Morrison, an out of town craps player, is murdered after taking Scalise (Gary Merrill, superb), a gangster with whom Dixon has a long history, for nineteen grand. Morrison was lured to the hotel by ex-soldier Paine, who used his pretty wife Morgan (Gene Tierney) as bait. When she refuses to continue the scheme by convincing Morrison to keep playing, Paine smacks her. Morrison intercedes, but Paine Kos him and flees, leaving the unconscious gambler with Scalise and his crew — and they want their nineteen large back.

So it’s no surprise that when the scene jumps to Dixon and his partner, cruising through Times Square, the radio dispatcher sends them to the hotel on a murder beef — Morrison is dead, knifed through the heart. Scalise, who clearly did (or ordered) the killing after Paine left, denies that Morrison won money in the game and wanted to leave, and contends instead that Paine murdered him in a jealous fight over Morgan. Dixon doesn’t buy it, but Lt. Thomas chalks the detective’s skepticism up to the torch he’s been carrying for Scalise and tells him to locate Paine, which brings us to the second scene. Dixon enters Paine’s cheap flat and discovers him attempting to phone Morrison — he wants his cut of the winnings — which refutes Scalise’s version of events and makes him for the real killer. But when Dixon tries to clear things up by taking Paine in, the drunk comes at him with a bottle. One well-placed uppercut later and Paine drops like a sack of potatoes, somehow dead from the blow. We find out later that he had a “silver plate in his head,” which explains how a bump on the noggin could kill him. The critical moment in the picture comes when Dixon squats down and realizes that he has accidentally killed Paine — albeit in self-defense. Preminger exploits the moment by lingering on Andrews’s terrified face. Rather than coming clean with the brass, Dixon stages an elaborate ruse to cast suspicion on Scalise. He tosses the room and throws Paine’s body in the river. He later offers a reason for his panicked response: “I covered it up … I couldn’t shake loose from what I was.”

In the immediate aftermath of the events at Paine’s flop, things seem to go well for Dixon, who develops a fast friendship with the newly-widowed Morgan, and begins to be teased by the possibility (as per Laura) of a life different than the one in which he’s been mired. (Yet Preminger’s ever-present moral ambiguity forces us to ponder whether it’s the relationship with the girl that saves the cop from the darkness, or if she isn’t some sort of ostensible femme fatale, and that because of her Dixon chooses to destroy himself.) It isn’t until Lt. Thomas directs his suspicion at Jiggs, Morgan’s taxi-driving father, that Dixon’s guilt begins to consume him. He eventually sees just one path out of his dilemma, that will exonerate Morgan’s father and bring Scalise to some sort of justice. The film’s final act sees Dixon’s confront his own demons and make his play for redemption. The denouement is far better than most viewers have given it credit for. It’s unexpected and subtle, a two-sided coin as rife with ambiguity as it is with possibility.

This is Dana Andrews’s film from start to finish, and Where the Sidewalk Ends rises and falls on his casting, which isn’t surprising given that he was a Fox contract star and had a both proven track record with Preminger as well as great chemistry with Tierney. Personally I love the guy, and the actor’s struggles away from the screen (Andrews alcoholism was at its peak at the time of production) certainly lend gravitas to his performance. Yet one wonders what sort of film this would have been if perhaps one of Hollywood’s more renowned tough guys — Hayden, Ryan, McGraw — could have been given the role. Certainly male-female chemistry is a significant aspect of the film, and Andrews was inarguably a more well-rounded leading man than those three, but Preminger asks his audience to accept Dixon’s toughness on his say-so, rather than establishing his brutality as, for example, Nicholas Ray does with Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground. Neither does Preminger do himself any favors in this regard by casting Neville Brand as a thug. An important physical scene calls for Andrews and Brand to mix it up, which plays like a fight between a hardened criminal and a bank teller. A closer look at the sequence, set in a Turkish bath, reveals a missed opportunity — one that if capitalized upon may have enhanced this film’s reputation as a noir. Rather than have the men fight amidst a backdrop of roiling steam, partially obscured by clouds of vapor, they trade fists in the massage room under the clarity of the hot lights. Compared to similar moments in other crime films, the fight seems clumsy and staged — and Brand, as he did in so many of his films, simply overwhelms the leading man.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is beautifully filmed, entertaining, and disturbing. The opening credits alone are worth the price of admission. What follows is special: an archetypal film noir that, although plot driven, manages to develop strong characters who undermine the pervasively upbeat notions of postwar American society. Dana Andrews’s existentially troubled cop thoroughly belies the image of a stable and detached police officer, while the relationship of Kenneth and Morgan Paine obliterates the popular idea of a happy postwar marriage, one characterized in the advertisements and television of the day by employment, picket fences, and most importantly, love. Its criminals are intelligent schemers who move effortlessly alongside more polite society and clearly don’t fear the forces of order. The movie’s noir statement is indelible.

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

Directed by Otto Preminger

Screenplay by Ben Hecht

Based on a novel by William L. Stuart

Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle

Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, and Gary Merrill

Released by 20^th Century Fox

Running time: 90 minutes

THE STEEL TRAP (1952)

In the 1952 film The Steel Trap, a dissatisfied and bored Jim Osborne (Joseph Cotten) passes the hours dreaming up ways to embezzle from the bank where he has, for the past eleven years, toiled himself into a life of restless humdrum. Soon daydreams morph into actual preparation, and Jim waits for the right weekend to put his plan into action. If he can clean out the vault one Friday after everyone else has gone home, he’ll have until Monday morning before the cash is missed. A million bucks jammed into a suitcase later and it’s planes, trains, and automobiles in a mad dash for Brazil — with his unknowing wife Laurie (Teresa Wright, lovely as a blonde) in tow. But just like a cat with a ball of yarn though, fate steps in and toys with the escape plan — Mr. and Mrs. Osborne can’t seem to get out of the country. When at last it looks as if they can get clear, Laurie gets wise to the theft and heads straight back to sunny California. Facing the prospect of cooking, cleaning, and sleeping all by himself, Jim also reverses course in a desperate attempt to replace the loot before the bank reopens Monday morning…

The themes at play in The Steel Trap aren’t unusual; the movie stands on the shoulders of films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), and Roadblock (1951), where other bored men use desperate, reckless means to escape the monotony of their middle-class existence. Don Siegel’s Private Hell 36 (1954) and Mark Stevens’s feverish Time Table (1956) would continue the trend through the middle fifties. Judging by the popularity and preponderance of these tropes throughout the entire arc of the classic film noir period, we come to understand how these crime films were able to effectively offer counter the trumped-up veneer of optimism smeared over the postwar culture — including most of Hollywood’s film output.

Sans film noir movies, where could we explore in an effort to come to terms with an inescapable truth of those years: Not one that suggested that for most Americans the prosperity and material gain wasn’t possible, but that it simply wasn’t enough. Jim Osborne has all the ingredients those glossy magazine ads led him to believe were the recipe for happiness, as he says to a coworker:

“I was just thinking I’ve got a wonderful wife, a wonderful daughter, good health, a steady job, a reasonably secure future. I should be a pretty contented man.”

And yet he isn’t. In spite of all those things (not to mention a cute little bungalow and shiny new car) Jim’s life is vacant and without purpose, and he is unable to come to terms with his malaise. In reflecting upon his unhappiness he doesn’t seek renewal through increased commitment to his family, or to his community, or by considering a different, possibly more fulfilling career — like an addict, he just wants more. A gossamer, tenuous more. Somewhere else, somewhere exotic.

Writer-director Andrew Stone, who made a long career of musicals but switched to noir melodramas in the fifties, essentially treats The Steel Trap as a suspenser. It moves quickly and doesn’t waste many frames putting the money into Jim’s suitcase. Most of the running time is used up watching the Osbornes scramble to overcome a Kafka-esque series of roadblocks, while Jim grows ever more paranoid and tense. For the most part it works, but Jim’s interactions with a bevy of airline clerks (as well as an absurd scene with a U.S. customs agent) grows tedious, and finally brings to mind a much-loved Steve Martin and John Candy satire from an utterly different genre. Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is as good as expected but Oscar winner Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography is not. The Steel Trap only occasionally looks as good as Laszlo’s other film noirs, and a few of his set ups can only be described as, well, lazy. In the end this is a well-made and watchable film that nevertheless resonates more as a reflection of its time and issues than it does as pure entertainment or on the merits of its production.

Beyond the overarching themes, two additional moments in particular stood out to me: one keys off Jim’s opening narration, which informs the audience that his tenure at the bank has lasted for eleven years. Fifty-two minus eleven equals Pearl Harbor: Jim, embezzling bank manager, missed the big one. It seems that many of us have forgotten that 1952 was a time of war in the United States, but certainly it was front and center in the minds of ticket-buyers at the time, and the filmmakers inserted the detail as to not alienate all of those who would have naturally assumed that Jim had served. It’s also fair to suggest, as a friend just reminded me, that by being cast as a criminal Jim serves not only as a stand-in for all of those “home front connivers” that made life more difficult for everyone during both wars, but also as a representative of the pervasive corruption depicted in such films as The Captive City. 

If 1952 was a time of war, it was also the era of burgeoning television and of rampant McCarthyism. (In just two short years, the reckless senator himself would fall prey to the devilish little device.) A later moment is emblematic of Hollywood’s take on both: Laurie, rehashing her day, tells Osborne about service calls from three repairmen. The first wanted $18 to fix their floor model, the second $32. The third restored the set to perfect working order by tightening a loose wire and didn’t charge a dime. It’s a shrewdly timed jab at the costliness and potential risk of television ownership, coming just as the device was beginning to proliferate in the rural and suburban areas of the country. The conversation between husband and wife hints at an issue more deeply troubling than the honesty of TV repairmen however. At the point when Laurie says, “integrity seems to be a thing of the past, I’d even suspect my own brother,” we have no choice but to cast our eyes at the person seated next to us in the theater. She is the innocent in The Steel Trap, the moral center of the film. And if she has fallen victim to suspicion and paranoia of a nation under the spell of Joe McCarthy, what hope can there be for the rest of us?

In real life, dissatisfied men of a certain age blow their savings on sports cars or hair implants; maybe they even fool around. In the world of film noir they commit crimes. The vast majority of them, whether real or celluloid, eventually come to their senses. It takes abandonment for Jim Osborne to come to his. He wanders the streets of New Orleans deep into the twilight, deciding whether to board the plane headed back to L.A. or the one for Rio, contemplating the life that accompanies each ticket:

“I walked and I walked. And with each step I realized more and more what it meant to be a thief. A man without honor, without self respect, a man without a wife, without a daughter, without a home.”

As he approaches a flower seller, the film slips into an eerie montage showing the Osbornes as every bit the family from the magazine ads. Strangely though, the series of images plays against the outline of an orchid, and are saddened by an ethereal Ella Fitzgerald tune. The effect of the montage is to suggest that these memories can’t be easily recaptured, if at all. Nevertheless Jim tosses his cigarette into the gutter and makes for the airport. Yet in choosing to return to his old life (provided he can undo his crime) I wonder if he has come to understand what exactly made it feel so hollow in the first place, or if he has discovered some better way to move forward — because his potential new life looks exactly like his old one and his change in outlook seems somewhat less than earth shattering. In this The Steel Trap leaves us to ponder some troubling questions. Hopefully Jim knows the answers.  

The Steel Trap (1952)

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Bert Friedlob

Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

Music by Dimitri Tiomkin

Starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright

Released by 20th Century Fox

Running time: 85 minutes

TRANSATLANTIC (1931)

I’ll admit I’m cheating a little by essaying Transatlantic here, but the film’s final few moments, a gun-in-hand, cat-and-mouse chase over the catwalks and up and down the ladders of the steamy bowels of an ocean liner, is as vividly expressionistic as anything you’ve seen in the noir movies of the forties and fifties.

Practically no one has seen Transatlantic (31 votes on IMDb at the time of this writing), but it is not a forgotten film. Plenty of folks want to see it, but just haven’t had the opportunity. It hasn’t ever been released on tape or disc; it hasn’t aired on any of the classic movie channels, and it is conspicuously absent from those movie download sites on the Internet. I purchased my copy from afar, and consequently was not surprised to see the opening title cards displayed in French. Transatlantic is an American film from William Fox, and all of the spoken dialogue is of course in English, but my copy must have been duped some years ago from a French 35mm print. There are two newspaper cutaway shots, (where the audience is shown a newspaper page that helps develop the story), that are also in French, though fortunately my grasp was sufficient enough to get the point.

 

It’s a singularly a remarkable film, which is only partly why it’s so highly sought after. The primary reason is that it’s also an Oscar winner: Gordon Wiles took home the statuette for art direction, though if there had been a prize for film editing awarded at the 1931-1932 ceremony, this film and editor Jack Murray would have won it. (There were just a dozen competitive awards that year; the editing category was still two years away.) Easily as noteworthy as the art direction — and to contemporary sensibilities probably moreso — is the trendsetting deep-focus photography of James Wong Howe, by 1931 already a virtuoso of the movie camera. And while it might be somewhat unfair to deny kudos for Transatlantic’s astonishing visuals to director William K. Howard, it must be said that while Howard made a few good pictures, none of them are as striking as this one, obliging us to award the lion’s share of the credit to Howe, Wiles, and Murray.  

There’s very little dialogue in opening sequence, though there’s a cacophony of noise. The titular ocean liner is preparing to leave New York for England, and we are treated to the dizzying chaos surrounding departure, all characterized by such dazzlingly showy filmmaking that one wonders if Busby Berkeley wasn’t somehow involved. Five and a half minutes of crane shots, dolly shots, tracking shots, and zooms; high angles, low angles, long shots and close-ups; the rich and the poor; the young and the old; drunken, sober, elated, and in tears; steerage and first-class; passengers and crew; taxis and barking dogs. It’s a delightfully frenetic opening, compressing the entire hubbub of departure into a few superbly edited moments. And while such a pace can’t be maintained for long, the opening sets the expectation for a fast paced and exciting film, one book-ended with an expressionistic sequence that nearly matches it for sheer visual enjoyment.

 

No one can claim that Transatlantic drags, though it necessarily has to slow down through its center. In the wake of the ship’s departure we get to know and travel with the passengers central to the story. I’m not interested in summarizing the plot, but the narrative concerns a group of unrelated travelers from assorted circumstances whose shipboard lives intertwine in unexpected ways. You could have figured that out on your own, right? Yet unlike many other films of the period, this is not a particularly plot-heavy film. And although it barely surpasses an hour, its cast of characters are all surprising well drawn and free of cliché. Characters meet and interact, but one doesn’t have the impression initially that the film is moving inexorably towards some resolution of story, that out ultimate goal is to find out “what happened.” Following this, it is possible to think of this as a sort of Grand Hotel at sea, though Transatlantic is more consciously visual, less star-driven, and churns on mystery rather than melodrama.

The star is Edmund Lowe, who plays the mysterious, yet refined and tuxedoed Monty Greer. We assume he’s a high stakes casino gambler or a gentleman thief, seemingly on the run. Also traveling are the Grahams (John Halliday and Myrna Loy). He’s a wealthy financier and philanderer; she’s the devoted, even if not so naïve wife. What she doesn’t know, however, is that her husband’s bank just went belly-up, and he’s absconding with the funds. The news of their misfortune catches up to them mid-voyage via the ship’s newspaper, sending into hysterics many of the ship’s other passengers, particularly the pedantic Mr. Kramer (Jean Hersholt), who heads for Graham’s cabin and a date with destiny…

There’s more to learn about the characters, but I won’t get into that. The movie builds up to the gem of a climax I mentioned earlier, where Lowe uses a handgun to tie up all of the story’s loose ends. It would be a crime to give the thing away, but this scene in particular is what I feel lets me get away with writing Transatlantic up on a page devoted to noir and crime films. Anyone who sees the sequence can’t deny that it must have been highly influential to the generation of filmmakers who would immerse themselves in the noir style. Taking place entirely within the mechanical confines of the ship’s darkest and most inaccessible spaces, Lowe chases his quarry through a warren of pipes and pistons, up ladders and across narrow grates, around corners over ledges. And through the steam — what steam! — billowing from countless valves seen and unseen, lit magnificently by countless well-hidden sources. It’s tense, expressionistic, and highly stylized. The actors must have sweated off ten pounds in the filming, and had a glorious time doing it. If it was ever true of a film, the denouement is worth the price of admission.

All too often we think we have the lineage of film noir completely pinned down and accounted for. Literary sources, cinematic sources, and even the studios and filmmakers themselves — all lined up and accounted for like the neat rows of faces in a mug book. Then a movie like Transatlantic — an ultra-chic art deco character mystery — bubbles up from the forgotten past, and reminds us that film can be a frustratingly and wonderfully nebulous art form, and that we aren’t quite as certain as we think we are. 

Transatlantic (1931)

Directed by William K. Howard

Written by Guy Bolton and Lynn Starling

Cinematography by James Wong Howe

Art Direction By Gordon Wiles

Starring Edmund Lowe, Myrna Loy, and Jean Hersholt

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running Time: 78 minutes