Fill your brain with enough ephemera, and eventually you’ll lose track of some of it. Consider the case of Where the Sidewalk Ends, an Otto Preminger noir cum police procedural screening at 7:00 pm on Thursday, March 22nd as part of Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing series, “Dark Past: Film Noir by German Emigrés.”

Though I’d seen Where the Sidewalk Ends in the past, my addled brain had long since conflated it with Fritz Lang’s 1956 crime drama While the City Sleeps — perhaps in part because both films are headlined by Dana Andrews. Of course, Lang was an Austrian, technically disqualifying his work from this series. Then again, Preminger was born in the Ukraine: perhaps PFA should have called this series “Film Noir by Citizens of the Former Habsburg Empire.” Maybe next time. … Continue reading »