Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

June 26, 1950, release date

Directed by Otto Preminger

Screenplay by Ben Hecht

Story by Victor Trivas, Frank P. Rosenberg, and Robert E. Kent

Based on the 1948 novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart

Music by Cyril Mockridge

Edited by Louis Loeffler

Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle

Dana Andrews as Detective Sgt. Mark Dixon

Gene Tierney as Morgan Taylor-Paine

Gary Merrill as Tommy Scalise

Bert Freed as Detective Sgt. Paul Klein (Dixon’s partner)

Tom Tully as Jiggs Taylor, Morgan’s father

Karl Malden as Detective Lt. Thomas

Ruth Donnelly as Martha, owner of Martha’s Café

Craig Stevens as Ken Paine

Robert Simon as Inspector Nicholas Foley

Harry Von Zell as Ted Morrison

Don Appell as Willie Bender

Neville Brand as Steve (Scalise’s henchman)

Distributed by 20th Century Fox

The opening title sequence is great, with chalk-like writing on a sidewalk. Gene Tierney’s and Dana Andrews’s names are shown first, then the movie title. Then two men, seen only via their shoes and their pants legs, walk over the movie title and exit off screen. The camera pans just a bit to the gutter and drain with running water. Only then do the credits start, with Mark Dixon and his partner riding in their police car and listening to the chatter on the police radio. (The police radio is a bit of realism that reminds me of the opening of another film noir: The Asphalt Jungle. The films were released only a month apart.)

Mark Dixon is a man haunted by his past. His father died trying to shoot his way out of prison, and Mark can’t let the memory go. He worries that he is exactly like his father, which only makes him more physical and aggressive in his police work. He accidently kills a murder suspect, which proves to him that he is his father’s son. But the movie’s portrayal of the fight scene leaves no doubt that it was an accident; it’s much more sympathetic to Mark than Mark is to himself.

By the way, the fight scenes in Where the Sidewalk Ends are very realistic. The fight between Dixon and Paine, the man he accidently kills, doesn’t use any stunt doubles. Dana Andrews and the actors give great performances here and in other fight scenes throughout the film. When Paine grabs Dixon by the throat, I could almost feel my own throat squeezed shut!

Why does Dixon tried to hide the accidental murder of Paine when it’s so clearly a matter of self-defense? Maybe he can’t bear the comparisons that will be made between him and his father. Maybe he can’t bear to hear Inspector Foley berate him again for his heavy-handed tactics. Dixon’s decisions, one bad one after another, lead deeper and deeper into a dark world that fate hands to him and he makes worse.

And I rooted for him the whole way! I wanted him to right his wrongs so he could spend time with his love interest, Morgan Taylor. Played by Gene Tierney, Morgan is separated from the dead man and still legally his wife. This fact compounds Mark’s torment: He knows what he has done and he continues to lie about it, both to his fellow officers and to the woman he loves. The rest of the film left me wondering, almost until the very end, whether Mark would live long enough, first of all, and whether he would start to turn his life around.

I did wonder a bit about the title: Where the Sidewalk Ends. Is it a metaphor for what can happen to people when they decide to leave civilization, or law and order, behind? Or when civilization (or law and order) doesn’t consider them worthy of protection anymore? Mark Dixon gives the clearest explanation of the theme and the meaning of the title when he says to Morgan, “Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you’re in over your head.” You end up in a world that has no clear edges and no longer makes sense.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is a great example of a film noir that keeps the suspense building. It gives a wonderful and sympathetic portrayal of a man burdened by his past.

And it certainly helps that Dana Andrews looks noir-perfect in his fedora and overcoat. He and Dick Tracy could have been brothers!

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

May 16, 2001 (Cannes), October 12, 2001, release date

Directed by David Lynch

Screenplay by David Lynch

Music by Angelo Badalamenti

Edited by Mary Sweeney

Cinematography by Peter Deming

Naomi Watts as Betty Elms, Diane Selwyn

Jeanne Bates as Irene

Dan Birnbaum as Irene’s companion

Robert Forster as Detective McKnight

Brent Briscoe as Detective Domgaard

Maya Bond as Aunt Ruth

Bonnie Aarons as the bum behind Winkie’s

Laura Elena Harring as Rita, Camilla Rhodes

Melissa George as Camilla Rhodes

Justin Theroux as Adam Kesher

Billy Ray Cyrus as the pool cleaner

Monty Montgomery/Lafayette Montgomery as the cowboy

Dan Hedaya and Angelo Badalementi as the Castigliani brothers

Michael J. Anderson as Mr. Roque

Joseph Kearney as Roque’s manservant

Ann Miller as Coco (the landlady and Adam’s mother)

Chad Everett as Jimmy Katz

Produced by Les Films Alain Sarde, Asymmetrical Productions, Babbo Inc. Canal+, The Picture Factory

Distributed by Universal Pictures

 Mulholland Dr. was released fourteen years ago this month. It still has the power to confound viewers. The director, David Lynch, has never offered any explanations about the film, which makes it more intriguing. I’ve seen it twice, and maybe two viewings are necessary for a film like this one that seems to offer viewers a look into a person’s mind at the moment of death. The mood of the film means everything, as was true of Winter’s Bone. David Lynch and Debra Granik created a noir mood for their respective films and stayed true to it and the story in each one.

(This blog post about Mulholland Dr. includes spoilers.)

Most of the film that takes place between the time that Betty’s head hits the pillow in the bedroom of her shoddy apartment and the time that she pulls out the gun from the bedside table takes place in the past. The film opens with a jitterbug sequence, with several dancers cut out to show more dancers and then more dancers again. Betty Elms, standing with an older man and a woman, is beaming. The next shot is a switch to a first-person point of view, with the camera moving into a bedroom with a bed, pink sheets, and a yellow or greenish-yellow blanket. Labored breathing is heard on the soundtrack as the camera moves into an extreme close-up on the pink pillowcase and then fades to black. That would be the moment when Betty’s head lands on the pillow.

Then everything is told from Betty’s point of view, but the way that she imagines recent past events in her life. The slow-tracking camera moves are first-person point-of-view shots from Betty’s point of view, but they seem to stop and linger before switching to the next shot. She seems to approach each set of events, then stop to re-imagine them with her revisionist memory. And as the movie progresses, it turns out that Betty has embellished some events with her own wishful thinking.

For instance, when she first meets Rita, her love interest, she is solicitous about her head wound and her loss of memory, which Rita sustained during a car accident. She wants to take care of Rita and help her regain her memory. The two of them eventually fall in love, and their relationship seems perfect, but slowly the truth intrudes. Betty may be trying to put a much more positive tone on her time in Hollywood, but the plot slowly reveals her self-deceptions.

In the final sequence, Betty is sitting in her shabby living room in a chenille bathrobe. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. Incessant knocking on her front door distracts her, but she starts to hallucinate. Tiny versions of the older man and woman, who stood with Betty in the opening sequence of the film, are trying to crawl under her front door and they succeed. They become life-size and chase her, and she runs screaming to the bedroom, where she falls on the bed.

At this point, Mulholland Dr. is back in the present, back at the moment at the beginning of the film where Betty’s head hits the pillow. Everything between the first camera shot moving into Betty’s bedroom at the beginning of the film and this moment near the end of the film when she runs screaming into her bedroom is what makes up the plot: Betty’s musings on the most recent events in her life while she was in Hollywood. The very last scene brings the plot back to the club Silencio that Betty and Rita visited one night and where all the acts were prerecorded, where everything gave the illusion of happening in the present. The shot then switches to the lone spectator (an illusion of a woman because it’s a man dressed as a woman?) in the box at the club, who whispers the word silencio.

The word silencio means “silence” in Spanish, but it seemed to mean the moment of death in Mulholland Dr. The entire film seems to be the ultimate illusion: that everything that the audience sees and tries to put into a coherent narrative form is simply a representation of Betty’s musings at the moment of death. In this interpretation, the film succeeds beautifully. It does have a loose narrative structure because the character’s final musings involve the recent past and nothing more. But it has some fantastic moments that don’t seem quite so fantastic if the basic premise of the film is that almost everything the viewer sees exists solely in Betty’s mind.