Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

as he was one of the few film directors to have imposed an image on the public mind. He
seems to have managed to do this with a stamp of authority as distinctive as Hitchcock’s
cameo appearances in his own films. From quite early on, while he was still a contract
director at Twentieth Century Fox, Preminger had started to operate as his own producer,
and a dozen years later he established himself as an independent producer-director. This
fact enabled him to come up with a very mixed collection of films, from a series of noir
productions in the forties to comedies (such as The Moon Is Blue, 1953) in the fifties and
contemporary institutional subjects, such as Exodus (1960) or Advise & Consent, in the
sixties.
The Preminger-Andrews creative association continued with the release of Where
the Sidewalk Ends, also a reunion with Gene Tierney. Dana Andrews plays again the role
of a Detective, Sgt Mark Dixon, who accidentally kills Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) while
investigating a murder and then proceeds to cover up his guilt. The majority of the film
depicts a brand of violence that has become a noir motif in Preminger’s filmography, one
that lurks below urban society. Moreover, the film succeeds in showing the darker side of
the police as many other noir films went on to do. As a police officer, Dixon is already in
trouble with his superiors for his oppressive tactics and his contempt for all criminals
(because his father had been one) leads him to a Freudian re-enactment of parental guilt.
The film reflects once more the penchant that the director has for exploring human
vulnerability, portraying Dixon as an archetypal noir anti-hero, in the role of a brutal New
York police detective that seeks to conceal his guilt while continuing his search for a killer
on whom to pin the murder. His plight becomes yet more frantic and the noir plot
undergoes a further twist when he falls in love with the widow Morgan (Gene Tierney) of
the murdered man.
The two scenes below show Dixon in curious but expressive compositions. In fig.
61, Dixon turns his back to his girlfriend, Morgan, while she is being questioned by his
colleague, one of the investigators. Trying to light his cigarette, his two hands and face
show emotional despair. The camerawork is particularly judicious and assumes the task of
exposing his guilt to the spectator, as Dixon, turning to us, takes up a posture of
supplication. In fig. 62, Dixon assumes the central position in the middle of the frame, but,
at a distance, he attempts to divert the investigation from himself. Although brutal and
fatalistic, Dixon reassesses his life towards the end, desperate for redemption. In these two
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