Nothing's going very well for Dana Andrews as detective Mark Dixon in Where the Sidewalk Ends. He starts off the day by being reprimanded for police brutality and that night while "questioning" the prime suspect in a murder case, he accidentally beats him to death. Dixon then falls in love with his victim's ex-wife, Gene Tierney, and while trying to cover up his guilt, he sets up an alibi that inadvertently implicates her father as the killer. Oh, and did I mention that he has been living his whole life under the shadow of his father, who used to be the ruthless gang boss of the city?

The movie was set up to capitalise yet again on the success of Laura by reuniting Otto Preminger and his two leads in another story by Vera Caspary, Laura's author. If the previous hit exposed moral corruption in high society, this 1950 film dives down into the depths of criminal low-life and shows the efforts of one man to pull himself up out of the darkness. Andrews portrays yet another archetypal noir hero, caught between his will to do good and a lack of control over both his fate and himself. As one critic put it, "his redemption - but not salvation - is made possible by his own ironic sense of justice." Andrew Horn