BODYGUARD (1948)

Lawrence Tierney’s hallowed reputation as the real-life embodiment of a film noir tough guy endears him to most movie fans and generally insulates him from criticism. Hard core enthusiasts often establish their noir bona fides by slinging stories of his off-screen exploits. He’s the cinematic equivalent of a made guy. If you can’t get with Tierney, it seems at times, you might as well leave film noir well enough alone — it probably ain’t for you. In spite of all that, beyond Tierney’s unique one-two punch — leading man good looks and his spectacular ability to project menace — he wasn’t much of an actor. When a role came along that he couldn’t charge into with his head down and his fists up, as was the case with director Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard, his performance comes up a few shells short of a stacked clip.

There’s little to care about here by way of story: Tierney plays a detective who gets pink-slipped on account of his strong-arm tactics, then framed for the murder of his lieutenant. That’s the extent of Bodyguard’s noir statement: wrongly accused ex-copper has to get out from under on his own steam. The rest is just running time. Along the way Tierney gets mixed up in some intrigue surrounding a murder cover-up at a meat-packing plant, and the wealthy owners who may or may not have had something to do with it.

Nevertheless, the critical mass surrounding Bodyguard is generally favorable, owing to some slick dialog and several deft directorial touches by Fleischer, just beginning his career. As far as Tierney is concerned, most other reviewers rehash the same tough mug platitudes that one bumps into when reading about Dillinger, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, or Born to Kill. In this case the praise isn’t merited. Tierney is miscast; and Bodyguard would have been a better movie with a more capable leading man. Woe is us that Paramount had Alan Ladd locked up at the time, because this is the kind of part that he was made for. Tierney is one-dimensional and flat; Ladd had something else. I’ll stop — I know the comparison is unfair.

Tierney had more in common with film noir’s iteration of Raymond Burr, and maybe even a leg up on him. Admittedly, this comparison is also unfair because Burr, in spite of his wide range and other special gifts as an actor, didn’t look like Ben Affleck. But can you imagine Tierney instead of Burr in Pickup? It’s at the very least intriguing. His air of corruption, the rough edges, the cheapness, and that hair trigger? Bodyguard asks him to holster all of these things, to sit on his hands, and one wonders if Priscilla Lane — she’s too perky not to like — wasn’t cast as the girl Friday in order to soften Tierney. After all, if we like her, and she likes him, we ought to as well, right? The hard sell goes even further: Tierney plays big brother to some neighborhood kids, tosses a ball back and forth with another, and drinks his milk like a good boy. But we’re unmoved; as an actor Tierney just wasn’t meant to be liked. Perhaps it took this movie to make sure of it.

* A note or two about the poster: In spite of the artwork, Tierney doesn’t rough up any women in the film. (For that matter, he never actually works as a bodyguard either.) Certainly the RKO brass were hoping the artwork would pull in the audience from his successful turn the previous year’s Born to Kill. And the image of Lane — it couldn't be less flattering. 

Bodyguard (1948)

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Screenplay by Fred Niblo Jr. and Harry Essex, based on a story by George W. George and Robert Altman.

Starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane

Produced by Sid Rogell

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 62 minutes

I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (1948)

It opens, this thing, on death row. A nameless penitentiary squats next to a river that turns over and over, churning like the guts of the suckers wasting away inside its walls. Three hours to go until the lights flicker and the warden once again flips the switch on the vacancy sign. It’s Number Five’s turn tonight, and he’s got no taste for the meal that arrives hot under a silver platter. Number Three puts on a record, hoping to take Number Five’s mind off the ticking of the clock, which echoes so loudly that not even the crashing of the river can drown it out. The other doomed men whisper to him from up and down the block, “Talk boy, tell us how you got here. Talking takes your mind off things when you’re up close to it.” So Number Five hunkers down onto the rack, probably for the last time, and gives. It has to do with a dead man, a wallet full of big bills, and a pair of dancing shoes.

“Where you been?” he remembers asking her.

“Around the world in a rowboat.” She said, her lips barely moving, tired after yet another night on her feet, eyeballing the bed and longing for the numbness of sleep. Give her a few hours and she’ll come back to life, having momentarily forgotten the too-tight heels, the threadbare dress, those same old tired records, and the wretched breath of lonely, clutching men.

It stings to look at her, to think about what she does for the rent. He isn’t pulling his own weight — they live off her sweat and tears. They both used to be real dancers, but that was a lifetime ago. The city was magnificent when the war was on, bright and abundant with six-week contracts, every grinning theatrical man’s door wide open. Not now though. In the months since it ended and the naval yard in Brooklyn began to teem with men again — older now, their eyes different — the nightclub gigs dried up and the city boiled down to this one room apartment and the dark alleys that surround it on all four sides.

He remembers his anger that night, the tangy flavor of it, remembers throwing one new dancing shoe, then the other after the alley cats bleating on the fence outside their window. The shoes were a gift from her, a sign that she still hoped, but to him they were just another reminder of his failure. He shut his eyes thinking he’d either get the shoes back in the morning or he wouldn’t, but when he dragged himself out of bed they were already there, leaning neatly up against the flat’s scarred door. He should’ve figured the shoes’ reappearance was fishy. If he wasn’t such a dumb cluck he would have thrown them in the incinerator.

Maybe he should have gotten wise later that afternoon, when he found the wallet and the money on the street. Third-rate hoofers like him didn’t catch breaks, there was something else at work here. It was if the thing had been put there just for him, where only he would find it. He had pounded this stretch of sidewalk, from one dour theatrical man’s locked door to the next, so often that he could do it through the haze that his life had become. He could have, should have turned it in — he wanted to, really — but she lit up when she saw the bills. She thought of the money as their ticket out, to the coast and maybe a chance in the movies, and what good was a man if he couldn’t give his girl the things she wanted?

But the cops had his number. They had taken a plaster of the footprint at the murder scene — in the alley right outside the apartment window. They knew it was a tap shoe. They knew the damn thing belonged to a man of his size and build. They started watching him and waiting for him to spend the money. It was a Bakelite radio that fouled them up, and not even a good one. Can’t a man buy his wife a radio without being hauled in for murder? Not in this nightmare. Now in a few hours, at midnight, this first Tuesday after Christmas, the lights will flicker and a day or two later some other sap will take his place, and the others will call him Number Five. He’ll have a story of his own to tell, and a river that listens.   

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948)

Directed by William Nigh

Screenplay by Steve Fisher

Story by Cornell Woolrich

Starring Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey

Cinematography by Mack Stengler

Released by Monogram Pictures (Walter Mirisch Productions)

Running Time: 70 minutes

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