Where the Sidewalk Ends

Mark Dixon with the man he's just accidentally killed

Not the best Otto Preminger film but a very good example of what he was about, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a film noir directed with maximum economy that re-teams Laura‘s golden pairing of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he again impassive as you like, she almost unbearably long-suffering. It’s not much of a role for her, as Laura wasn’t in fact (her character was literally dead for most of it and for the rest of it represented ideal womanhood). But for Andrews it’s a great example of his abilities inside the noir genre, where minimalism is generally the best option. No one was more minimal than Andrews. He’s Dirty Harry before Dirty … Read more

Fallen Angel

Eric and Stella

Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at. He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets about trying to work his charms on a town full of hayseeds. Stop number one, another pair of grifters who run a clairvoyant act. But even before he gets stuck into Professor Madley (John Carradine, cadaverous features well deployed) and his assistant Joe (Olin Howard), Eric (Andrews) has had the misfortune of running into Stella (Linda Darnell), the … Read more

Bunny Lake Is Missing

Ann in a toy hospital surrounded by dolls

Almost everyone is a sexual pervert in 1965’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, a heady and not entirely coherent psychological thriller with melodramatic tendencies and swivelling eyes to match. Directed by Otto Preminger, a man with a love of the lurid, and with American stars in the lead, it was shot in the UK, away from the chokehold of American puritanism. And what a collection of weirdos Preminger puts on screen as he tells the story of the Lakes, a couple whose daughter disappears on her first day at a sweet and twee school in London’s well heeled Hampstead. At any rate Preminger lets us believe they are a couple, man and wife, until … Read more

Laura

Laura with Shelby Carpenter

A complex psychological thriller masquerading as a film noir, 1944’s Laura is about three men who are bewitched by a woman so ethereally, transcendentally beguiling that it is entirely appropriate that, when director Otto Preminger takes the curtain up, Laura (Gene Tierney) is already dead. What follows is a basic whodunit pulled in various unusual directions. A for-instance: the cop on the case, Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews), invites one of the men suspected of killing her, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), to accompany him while he cross-examines other witnesses. What cop does that? Another: the cop doesn’t do very much actual investigating and instead spends an inordinate amount of time in the dead woman’s … Read more

Daisy Kenyon

Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda

Let’s just get this out of the way. Daisy Kenyon isn’t a film noir, even though it features on many noir “best of” lists. It’s a romantic melodrama of a very peculiar sort – â€œHigh powered melodrama surefire for the femme market” is how Variety described it on its release in 1947, in their odd, truncated way of communicating. More up-to-the-minute viewpoints can be found on Amazon – “NOT a true example of film noir”… “certainly not a film noir”… “DEFINITELY NOT FILM NOIR” – three of many. However, the tagging persists. It’s in the Fox Film Noir series of movies, its Amazon page pegs it as “Mystery & Suspense/Film Noir”, which is doubly, … Read more