Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Where the Sidewalk Ends

Cast: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully, Karl Malden, Ruth Donnelly, Craig Stevens, Neville Brand, Grayce Mills, Robert F. Simon, Harry von Zell. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Victor Trivas, Frank P. Rosenberg, Robert E. Kent, based on a novel by William L. Stuart. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a tough cop who's just a little too eager to rough up the suspects, and he starts the film by getting demoted for it That barely fazes him, however: When he's called on to interview Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), a suspect in a murder that's just been committed, Paine fights back and Dixon punches him out. Unfortunately, Paine had a severe head injury in the war, and he dies. Dixon's attempts to cover up only make things worse, leading to a snarl of consequences that form the plot of this darkly entertaining crime drama. What elevates Where the Sidewalk Ends into more than routine is mostly Ben Hecht's richly slangy, cynical dialogue and Otto Preminger's smooth direction. It helps, too, that Preminger is working with people who made his Laura (1944) one of the classics of Hollywood film: Andrews, of course, who even shares the name Mark with his cop counterpart in Laura, Gene Tierney as another leading lady with a lousy taste in men, and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who won an Oscar for the earlier movie. Laura was, however, almost baroque in contrast with the tight, spare Where the Sidewalk Ends, which depends on Hecht's skill at crafting tough talk to overcome some of the story's reliance on pop psychology: Dixon, it seems, developed his sadistic approach to police work because he hated his father, who was a hoodlum gunned down by the cops. The film ends on a nicely unresolved note after Dixon admits to killing Paine and trying to cover it up at the same time that he's being honored for bringing mobster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) to justice. 

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

Cast: Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, George Sanders, Glenn Langan, Faye Marlowe, Alan Napier. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Harry Reynolds. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

Hangover Square is a standard costume melodrama made memorable by Laird Cregar's performance and Bernard Herrmann's score. It was Cregar's last film: He died at the age of 31 before it was released. Wanting to escape the typecasting that had made him one of the movies' go-to villains, he set out to turn himself into a leading man, dieting down from his usual 300 pounds with the aid of amphetamines and thereby damaging his heart. In Hangover Square he is almost handsome, or at least hard to recognize as the hulking villain who menaced Victor Mature in I Wake Up Screaming (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) and Tyrone Power in The Black Swan (Henry King, 1942). He plays George Harvey Bone, a composer working on a piano concerto, which was actually composed by Herrmann and has subsequently been performed and recorded as Concerto Macabre. But Bone is mentally ill, subject to blackouts during which he resorts to acts of violence that the otherwise mild-mannered Bone can't remember after they've passed. The illness also leads him into two clashing worlds: the genteel one of classical music, where he woos Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe), daughter of the eminent conductor who plans to introduce his concerto to the world, and the louche one of the music halls, where he falls for the ambitious singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), who wants him to write songs for her that will propel her to stardom. The psychology of the film is hokum, of course, owing a heavy debt to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but Cregar's ability to switch from vulnerability to violence in an instant gives the character credibility. The fiery climax of the film is particularly well-staged.

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Richard Haydn in Cluny Brown

Adam Belinski: Charles Boyer
Cluny Brown: Jennifer Jones
Andrew Carmel: Peter Lawford
Betty Cream: Helen Walker
Hilary Ames: Reginald Gardiner
Sir Henry Carmel: Reginald Owen
Col. Charles Duff Graham: C. Aubrey Smith
Jonathan Wilson: Richard Haydn
Lady Alice Carmel: Margaret Bannerman
Mrs. Maile: Sara Allgood
Syrette: Ernest Cossart
Mrs. Wilson: Una O'Connor
Dowager at Ames's Party: Florence Bates
Uncle Arn: Billy Bevan

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt
Based on a novel by Margery Sharp
Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle
Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: Dorothy Spencer
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge

Ernst Lubitsch's celebrated "touch" was mostly a good-humored, occasionally naughty irony and a flair for pulling off sly sight gags such as the one that ends Cluny Brown: Cluny and Belinski are viewing his book in a shop window when she's suddenly taken faint, followed by a cut to the shop widow in which a sequel to Belinski's book is now displayed. The gag works only if you've caught the set-up, a joke I needn't spoil, but it's a reminder that Lubitsch, like so many of the great directors of the '30s and '40s, learned his trade in silent films. Which makes it all the more amazing that he was so deft with dialogue. Cluny Brown is also a great showcase for its stars, Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, who were never quite so charming in any of their other films. Especially Jones, who was manipulated by David O. Selznick into so many roles that she had no business playing, such as the supposedly sultry but really campy part of Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, a film that appeared the same year as Cluny Brown, but seems to be taking place in another galaxy. That Jones could move from Pearl to Cluny with such grace suggests that she was a finer actress than Selznick ever let her be. Cluny also showcases some wonderful character actors, especially the always welcome Richard Haydn as Cluny's unsuitably prissy would-be fiancé and Una O'Connor as his mother, whose "dialogue" consists of clearing her throat. But mostly the Lubitsch finesse is what saves Cluny Brown from turning into the twee horror it might have been with its gallery of talkative eccentrics and off-beat situations. Instead, it's a refreshingly delicate comedy shadowed only by the fact that it was to be its director's last completed film, a reminder of the exchange that took place at Lubitsch's funeral when Billy Wilder sighed, "No more Lubitsch," and William Wyler replied, "Worst than that. No more Lubitsch pictures."

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

Laura is a clever spin on Pygmalion, with a Henry Higgins called Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) whose protégée is an Eliza Doolittle called Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). It's also a spin on the classical myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue of Galatea he had sculpted, bringing her to life. This Pygmalion is a detective, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), who falls in love with the portrait of Laura, who he thinks has been murdered, and is startled when she walks through the door, very much alive. Maybe this classical underpinning explains why Laura has become such an enduring classic, but probably it really has to do with a story so well-scripted, by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Elizabeth Reinhardt from a novel by Vera Caspary, well-acted by Webb, Tierney, and Andrews, along with Vincent Price as the decadent Shelby Carpenter and Judith Anderson as the predatory Ann Treadwell, and most of all, directed with the right attention to its slyly nasty tone by Otto Preminger, one of the most underrated of Hollywood directors of the 1940s and '50s. Like such acerbic films as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Laura is full of characters one would be well advised to steer clear of in real life, but who make for tremendous entertainment when viewed on a screen from a safe distance. It makes a feint at a conventional happily romantic ending, with Laura supposedly going off with McPherson, but do we really believe it? Laura Hunt has shown dubious taste in men -- whom McPherson characterizes as "a remarkable collection of dopes"-- including the desiccated fop Waldo and the smarmy kept man Shelby. So it's hard to believe the social butterfly Lydecker has created is going to settle down happily with a man who, as Waldo says once, fell in love with her when she was a corpse and apparently has never had a relationship with a woman other than the "doll in Washington Heights who once got a fox fur outta" him. Laura is notable, too, for its deft evasions of the Production Code, including Laura's hinted-at out-of-wedlock liaisons, which are at the same time undercut by the suggestions that Waldo and Shelby are gay -- another Code taboo. (Shelby, for example, has an exceptional interest in women's hats, including one of Laura's and the one of Ann's that he calls "completely wonderful.") This shouldn't surprise us, as Preminger went on to be one of the most aggressive Code-breakers, challenging its sexual taboos in The Moon Is Blue (1953) and its strictures on the depiction of drug use in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), and giving the enforcers fits with Anatomy of a Murder (1959). In addition to the contributions to Laura's classic status already mentioned, there is also the familiar score by David Raksin. (Johnny Mercer added lyrics to its main theme after the film was released, creating the song  "Laura.") And Joseph LaShelle won an Oscar for the film's cinematography.

Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955)

It's been quite a few years since I last saw Marty and I had forgotten how engaging a movie it is. The credit largely belongs to Ernest Borgnine in the title role and Betsy Blair as Clara, touching in their vulnerability and remarkable low-key chemistry together. And of course there's Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay, which brings them together convincingly and keeps them apart smartly. I do have to object to Chayefsky's overdoing of the "what do you wanna do tonight" shtick, which kept contemporary comedians busy far too long, and to the self-pitying Italian mama stereotypes of Marty's mother, Mrs. Piletti (Esther Minciotti), and Aunt Catherine (Augusta Ciolli), but it's on the whole a well-made script. Some credit is obviously due to the director, Delbert Mann, who also directed Chayefsky's 1953 teleplay on which the movie is based. It was his big-screen debut and won him an Oscar, but he never followed up with another comparable film -- his best later work was probably on two Doris Day comedies, Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962). Oscars also went to Borgnine, Chayefsky, and the film itself, and nominations to Blair, Joe Mantell as Marty's pal Angie, Joseph LaShelle's wonderfully atmospheric cinematography, and to the art directors. In fact, if Marty has any lasting claim to fame other than being a satisfying romantic drama, it's in the Academy's uncharacteristic recognition of a "little" film -- especially noticeable in the mid-50s when the prevailing Hollywood trend was to "give 'em something they can't get on television." Since they had already gotten Marty on TV two years earlier, the Oscar attention was especially surprising. It didn't signal any sort of trend, however: The following year, the best picture winner was Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson), a typically bloated extravaganza loaded with movie-star cameos, and for the first time, all of the best picture nominees for 1956 were filmed in color. It was as if the Academy had said, "Fine, we did our duty, now let's get back to business."