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Where the Sidewalk Ends (20th Century-Fox), a melodrama in monotone, reunites the team that made Laura: Producer-Director Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. The new picture makes Laura, one of 1944's best films, look better than ever. Andrews plays a tough Manhattan detective with a bad record for manhandling criminals. When he inadvertently kills one, he covers up his trail with false clues, and suspicion points to Gene Tierney's father. It takes no end of foolish talk and action for Andrews to square himself with the law and the girl.
The Flame and the Arrow (Warner) gives ex-Acrobat Burt Lancaster something he really knows how to do. Almost a spoof of the kind of swashbuckling gymnastics that made Douglas Fairbanks famous, the movie is built around a tumbling act. Feebly disguised as a band of gay rogues in 12th Century Lombardy, Lancaster and some old circus associates swing from chandeliers, draperies and trapezes, drop from trees and balconies, climb ropes and poles and all over each other.
The script, huffing & puffing to find excuses for these athletic feats, tells an opéra-bouffe story involving Lancaster's "free men of the mountains," a foreign tyrant (Frank Allenby), and a fair lady (Virginia Mayo). Happily, their contrived heroics are spiked with some unconscious comedy.
Lancaster is probably the best acrobat now employed as an actor. After a series of gangster films, he obviously relishes his promotion from a hood to a Robin Hood. But dialogue still throws him, and his modern side-mouthings ("I'll meetcha inna tavern") sound a little disenchanting in Technicolored medieval Lombardy.
*Who wore special contact lenses on her blue eyes so they would photograph as authentic Indian brown.