Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Sidewalk Ends is a 1950 film noir directed by Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews as the hard-nosed rule-breaking police detective who despises all criminals, and Gene Tierney as the love interest. Karl Malden, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully and Ruth Donnelly (who played Sister Michael in The Bells of St. Mary's). If you like film noir you can't go wrong here.

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Slant Magazine calls it an "efficient, bleak noir" and says,

By alternating between physical confrontations staged in silence and expressionistic close-ups of the stone-faced Andrews set to Cyril Mockridge's crashing melodramatic score, the director accentuates not only the brutality but also the desperate emotional impact of his story's bursts of sudden violence.

DVD Talk notes "Dana Andrews' haunted portrait of a fallible law enforcement officer," "Otto Preminger's classy direction and the seemingly eternal night in New York," and "good supporting actors and convincing art direction". TCM has an overview. Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 100%.