DVD NOTES.(Where the Sidewalk Ends)(House by the River)(Video Recording Review)

NOIR AND AGAIN -- The American film noir of the postwar era resulted largely from the unleashing of the hyper-expressive filmmaking styles of immigrant German-speaking directors. Two new DVDs reveal the differences and similarities between two masters of the genre.

The New York police detective Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews), who has more than a dozen brutality complaints on his record, accidentally kills a man and goes to extraordinary lengths to cover up his crime. Along the way, he falls in love with the dead man's wife (Gene Tierney) and lets her father take the rap. That's the tensely ratcheted story of "Where the Sidewalk Ends" (Fox), a streetwise film noir that Otto Preminger directed in 1950. Despite the melodramatic intensity of the plot, Preminger works with coolly balanced two-shots and inert, opaque closeups that put the onus of moral choice on his characters without revealing their motives. Preminger, born in Vienna in 1906, the son of an attorney, earned a law degree and made his name there as a stage director of courtroom dramas. Even after establishing himself in Hollywood and expanding his range of subjects, he remained a master ...