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Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
Topic Started: Dec 6 2011, 09:47 AM (245 Views)
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Ugliness at Gary Merrill's floating Manhattan crap game, and a high-stakes gambler from Texas is stabbed through the heart. The cops, led by Karl Malden and Dana Andrews, are on the case, but the suspect, Craig Stevens, shows up in the river with a fractured skull. Stevens' father-in-law, who had threatened to kill him if he got in any more trouble, is quickly arrested, but his widow - lovely Gene Tierney - makes such an impression on Andrews that he vows to clear her old man. What nobody but us knows, though, is that Andrews - a brutal cop with a hatred for criminals - was the guy who beat the suspect to death and dumped him in the East River. Wow!

When last we were discussing Otto Preminger's noirs, I was disliking Whirlpool very much. Well, I like this movie a lot - how noirish is THIS! The film opens with feet on a dark, dirty sidewalk (with the credits in chalk) and then the camera pans to a gutter and down a drain. And that's in the first 2 minutes of the movie! Tierney hasn't too much to do but look pretty, but the rest of the cast is able and impressive. Neville Brand and Lou Nova are thugs(!), I don't think there's a brightly-lit scene in the picture, the Fox DVD looks wonderful, and I just had a great 90 minutes watchin' THIS one.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Frank Hale
Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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I liked this one, too, although I remember thinking that Gary Merrill was a little too intellectual to be a convincing gangster. Dana Andrews always seemed to do well in these noirs.

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I neglected to mention that Merrill - who plays an Italian mobster named Scalisi - is ridiculous in the role. I didn't let it bother me, but I was thinking that Neville Brand - who played Al Capone on The Untouchables, of course - would've been much better in the role.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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panzer the great & terrible
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You both deserve a medal for not using the word Laura. I like this pitcher too. I'm no Preminger fan, but when he had a good script, as with Anatomy of a Murder, he could be brilliant, and that's no small thing. He also did that awful right wing novel Advise and Consent and defanged it. Didn't do any good in the long run but it was a cool prank and hugely annoyed the bad guys. I guess it just fed into their "liberal media" fantasy but I laughed a lot at the time, and of course Gene Tierney was in the picture, gorgeous as ever.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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