In The Days When Crime Paid And The Coppers Took Their Graft Anyway They Could-Gene Tierney and Dana Andrew’s “Where The Sidewalk Ends” (1950)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

Where The Sidewalk Ends (yeah, I know, they must have spent about three dollars to some starving stringer in the scriptwriters’ quarters to come up with that title), starring lovely Gene Tierney and pretty boy Dana Andrews, directed by Otto Preminger, 1950    

I get down on my hands and knees every day and pray that the day never comes when professional writing, review writing, ever stops being a dog eat dog proposition. Stops being what young, well she is younger than I am after all, Sarah Lemoyne, a fellow reviewer here following her mentor old greybeard Seth Garth has called a cutthroat business where only the strong and ruthless survive-once they get their coveted by-lines. Of course I would discount out of hand anything Mr. Garth has to inform the young and unwashed with, impressionables like Ms. Lemoyne, since I took the full measure of the man when he went down in flames in our “dueling” film review set-too on the question of the iconic nature of Sherlock Holmes and Doc Watson in their long and illustrious film series. I won’t bore the reader with details here but Garth insisted that the whole series was nothing but an ill-disguised homage to the Homintern, to their kinky little high-brow male same-sex club complete with every thief and con man in the kingdom doing their bidding.  And Ms. Lemoyne bought into that madness, following Seth’s lead about me being wet behind the ears since I didn’t catch on to the importance of “dilly boys,” young male whores, riffraff really in the whole scheme of their illegal Baker Street operations covered up by a see no evil landlady. But enough of that since if anybody is still interested in that what did wizened and senile, for once Sarah got it right, Sam Lowell call it, oh yes, a tempest in a teapot they can thumb through the archives at this publication (and American Film Gazette with whom this publication has reciprocal agreements on high profile reviews).         

Yes, I gladly bent the knees for the glories of beating down so-called film reviewers who have passed their prime and hope the nightmarish day never comes when, egged on by the likes of Amazon and Netflix, every buffoon who has access to the Internet, to endless cyberspace decides without any evidence that they can take on the lions, the real film reviewers. I have made a point of this mainly to respond to Ms. Lemoyne’s comments in her baffling film review of the first of the Star Wars episodes where she castigated me for not being a whirling dervish slave of the series after I panned, dismissed out of hand, Star Wars: The Last Jedi where ancient has-been, maybe never was, Mark Hamill as some sullen greybeard AARP-type Luke Skywalker finally gives us some relief from his tedious attempts at fighting inter-galactic evil from some ill-thought out self-imposed exile while younger,  fresher forces are willing to do battle up close and personal. Hell, I just realized that the plot-line of that movie could stand in for the controversy swirling around this joint’s water cooler between the has-beens and the new vanguard forces.  

Maybe I had better step back a bit and describe what the whole sad saga, this eternal office politics struggle is all about.  Sarah was assigned, and in this I think rightly so, a nice six-pic review package of cheaply produced and scripted psychological thrillers outsourced by Columbia Pictures to low-rent, low overhead Hammer Productions over in England back in the late 1950s. Then wizened and senile Sam Lowell who seems to endlessly hangs around the water cooler looking for young women to recognize him as the max daddy, his expression I think, of the film noir world based on some book he wrote or ghosted I never got it straight stormed into site manager Greg Green’s office and demanded based on some film noir series he had done put out by the same production company years ago to do Sarah’s series. Greg, needless to say, caved in automatically. Reason: Sam Lowell’s by-line is still a watch-word among noir aficionados. Real reason: Sam was the decisive vote when he cut his old friend Allan Jackson’s throat which gave the job to Greg. Yeah, office politics.      

Moving along. Sarah outraged turned to her mentor Seth hanging out at the water cooler just after her banishment. I would discount any denials by either one of them that nothing, noting romantic is in the cards between them but that is not germane to what happened next so I will can it. I will say old-time mentor Seth really did give some good advice on this score. He told Sarah to get right back in there before things cooled off and demand some kind of equivalent assignment. Hence her Star Wars package. Hence her stabbing me in the back over my perfectly righteous review of a bunch of has-beens whose only real existence now is to keep extorting sad sack parents for tickets, sodas and that awful popcorn for sullen underfoot kids that keeps the studios humming along.

I took her measure and the next Star Wars review I will give my considered judgment of the film and of her work but today I have a bigger score to settle. Have to take down one Samuel Lowell (don’t know his middle name or if he has one) and his sullied reputation as the king hell king, his expression of the film noir world. A reputation based on his “definitive” work The Night Belongs To Film Noir way back in the late 1960s and which even Sarah Lemoyne mentioned was something that every serious aficionado or noir reviewer has to acknowledge as the cat’s meow. Then it might have been true, and even today there are probably kernels of wisdom which a reviewer could profit by. But some of the stuff he spewed out was, well, bullshit. How do I know this?

Greg Green who is all over the place on what he does, or does not, want to see this publication become has latched onto a new idea that the younger writers like Sarah and I, maybe Minnie Moore, should take a fresh eye look at some older material that has withstood the test of time-or Hollywood is still putting out. Hence Sarah’s Star War look, hence my Sherlock Holmes take, and now I have been assigned to do a fresh-eyed look at film noir. Starting with the classic Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney film noir Where The Sidewalk Ends.

Reason: this is one of the films Sam reviewed, or somebody under his direction reviewed, many years ago. Re-reading his piece gave me a better idea that the old man really did have one idea and blasted a gullible world with ever since. I will explain below but you should also know that Sam was notorious for either having somebody, a stringer, write his stuff once he got his lifeline by-line or just ripped off whatever the studio publicity department put out and signed his name to it. I think the latter here.

My late grandfather who was a cop’s cop which I believed until I found out that he like all his brethren never paid for his coffee and crullers at Ida’ Bakery once some older cop clued him in always said that if a cop turns, if a cop goes rogue then get rid of him (and now him or her). And he should have known since he was a captain in the Albany Police Department and had seen it all, done it all. That seemed to be the family consensus as well since the family was infested with coppers who paid attention to the old man and probably took their coffee and cruller graft too. That idea, that getting rid of a bum cop is the story line behind this cute little noir. My grandfather would have been happy with the ending here. Of course Sam Lowell went to great lengths to yak about how one Mark Dixon, played by Dana Andrews, should have been lauded not lammed (and old town expression meaning given the boot, unceremoniously given it). And in the process destroying the whole premise of noir that no evil deed will go unpunished even as the bodies pile up. But maybe I had better run the story-line and you will see how Sam booted the ball something terrible.            

Even Sam Lowell, if not now then in his prime, in the time of his so-called definitive noir primer, would have to agree with my contention that it was a lot easier to say what a good noir private detective is than what a good public copper was when it came right down to it before he got all soft and dewy-eyed about reformed coppers. Jesus, Sam set the table on private eyes, guys, always guys in those days, who maybe had gotten some higher education (a good observation by him noting the germane reason why private dicks always were one or seven steps ahead of the slothful by-the-book, a book they couldn’t read in most cases, public coppers), had worked the public racket maybe in the DA’s office but saw the graft and gaff and didn’t worry about the pension twenty years out for staying low and unobserved, ready to take a slug or two, a fist or two to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world. If a good-looking dame, a femme, a what did Sam call them in the prime, frails, twists crossed his path and maybe curled his toes, and I hope I don’t have to explain what that meant to the good reader so much the better. If he rode off in the sunset with her fine, if he had to throw her over, well that was the breaks, that’s the way the ball bounced. Guys like Sam Spade, Phil Marlowe, Lance Larkin, and a host of others lighted up the firmament and raised hell with the public coppers just for kicks while getting their respective cases closed.

        

Film noir good public coppers, guys like Mark Dixon under review here are harder to figure in those pre-Miranda days. Mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, my grandmother’s expression, the one married to the police captain, could have given a fuck about criminal rights save that for the ACLU lawyers and the faint-hearted liberals and had the mindset of desert rats in heat. I would have taken Mark Dixon, bright boy Mark Dixon for what passed for a good cop in those days. Unlike my uncles who were afraid to get out of the squad car for fear they might have to do something which might jeopardize their heavenly pensions, who were mostly “on the take” from one guy or another (unknown to grandpa while he was alive anyway) and whose idea of justice was roughing up, pistol-whipping, Ida of Ida’s Bakery for having the audacity to ask them to pay for their coffee and crullers when she was having trouble meeting the rent money Mark Dixon was a straight-arrow copper. Did a little “third degree” here, a little rabbit punch there, a cold-cocked pistol-whipping for kicks. A little over the top but            not enough to get the commissioner and his underlings in a snit unlike when the Mayfair swells complained when he busted up their floating crap games or they had to fork over cases of high shelf whiskey. Mark’s idea of justice, if he knew the word, ran to hard fists and no bullshit.

For a while and for a while Sam Lowell kept propping him up in his famous turncoat review (the first time he went soft on a police procedural public copper when he did not have to do so at all). Then Dixon went crazy trying to frame local mobster Jimmy Scalise for everything from starting World War II to jacking up the price of gold and silver. Reason: and this would be Sam’s downfall, his Achilles Heel if you really want to know, Mark’s father, Jeep Dixon was the king-pin mobster before Jimmy, had put Jimmy on easy street with the gambling and whorehouse concessions and when Jeep ran afoul of the coppers for trying to cut their swag he died in a blaze of gunfire “trying to escape.” I don’t have to draw a diagram for you on that one. Dixon was scarred, was bleeding heart liberal scarred by being the son of a gangster, couldn’t take it and became a hard-nosed, third degree no holds barred copper. Sam bought that lonely hearts story hook, line and sinker. Saw this as a breakthrough for noir coppers with brains. Jesus.      

Of course Sam all rose-colored glasses now, or was it his ghostwriter who did him in, that will probably be his alibi when he answers this accusation, if he has the moxie to, and an accusation is exactly what it is, didn’t count on Mark committing about eight thousand felonies and a few misdemeanors in the mix, trying to save his damn ass from going up to Ossining and a “party” with a few guys he put in stir, a few guys who needed a “girlfriend” to while away those twenty years they were doing for crossing Dixie boy. This is where the unacknowledged American psycho part comes in. Mark was so obsessed with getting Scalise and his boys that he would stop at nothing. Figured when some rich Texas oilman got bonged, got good and bonged to death for winning too much dough at one of Jimmy’s get togethers that he had the bastard cold. Jimmy was not Jeep’s acolyte for nothing and he easily slipped Dixon’s noose with a pretty tale which the chief coppers bought.

Dixon was frantic, saw his golden opportunity for a frame, a big old square frame slip away, melt like butter on a hot summer day so he went to see the ringer, to see the guy who brought Tex to the party, brought some pretty frill as well who will get introduced soon. Confronted the ringer a little too hard and said ringer who had a steel plate in his head from a war injury went dead. Oops.

From there it is all downhill for Dixon as he makes mistake after mistake even a mental midget could see would not work. He tried to frame Jimmy for this one and instead got the ringer’s father-in-law, or maybe ex-father-in-law facing the big step-off in his place. This is where Morgan, played by Gene Tierney last seen in this space with that same Dana Andrews under different circumstances when he was trying to find out who killed her in the noir classic Laura, comes in and muddies up the waters, for Mark. See that ringer was her ex-husband, had been a guy, a war veteran like so many others and who various older writers at this publication, including Seth and Sam, have written extensively about, who couldn’t adjust after their military service. The ringer wanted easy street and so linked up with Jimmy. Brought Morgan along for the ride on the Texas oilman caper.

Mark and Morgan meet and are attracted to each other without knowing why and without knowing that Mark did in her ex-husband, accident or no, and would set the trap for her father to take the rap for killing his ex-son-in-law. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel which Sam gushed all over himself about. Tough copper Dixon, falling for the frill, can’t let her father fall fatally so devised a plan to let Jimmy fall if he can get one of his minions to snitch. That bastard does and Dixon grabs Jimmy for a hard fall. Here is where it gets sappy, where Sam begins his long fall from grace, Dixon’s superior is all set to let him back on the force when he hands back Dixon a letter he had written telling all he had done to cover up murder, mayhem and frameups. Dixon in a fit of conscience tells the superior to read the letter. Dixon will get to be somebody up at Ossining girlfriend after all. Morgan, father cleared, will stand by her man now that he has manned up. Sam has declared that scene the beginning of neo-film noir. I swear the last original thing he had to say was in about 1964, 1965.  As for his take on this film. Ugh! The emperor has no clothes.