DANA Andrews’ role helped establish the ability of Hollywood films, particularly those of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, to find acting temperaments which matched the social and subjective intention of a film’s content.

If the ultimate value of art is to affect us, via writing, painting, sculpting, architecture, music, or acting, it is only through style that such a value can be achieved, since style (or form) is inseparably connected to the delivery of content.

Dana Andrews in 1946
1946 was one of Dana’s busiest years on screen. Apart from ‘THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES’, two other films became examples of his skill at conveying uncorrupted inner strength under trying circumstances, and also quiet ambitious perseverance of constructive social goals involving communities.
Those films were: ‘A WALK IN THE SUN’, directed by Lewis Milestone, and the beautiful social Western, ‘CANYON PASSAGE’, directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Director Milestone, one of those unflinchingly frank Hollywood filmmakers who refused to establish stereotypical patterns with his films, had already used Andrews in ‘THE NORTH STAR’ of 1943, a unique American film which was strategically pro-Russia and its socialist values against Nazi invaders during World War II.
In 1946, Milestone’s almost documentary style complemented the rugged role of determined soldiers on a long, one-day march in Italy, led by a weary but wise commander, played unforgettably by Dana Andrews in ‘A Walk In The Sun’, whereas Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Canyon Passage’ of the same year reflected the gentle civilized taste of this French immigrant director in Hollywood, whose film offered Andrews the role of a quiet, thoughtful and considerate man helping a new community of agricultural pioneers in the West.
The role suited Andrews’ benevolently masculine yet un-conflicting temperament, making this an extremely valuable Western outside of North America as well.

Daisy Kenyon
It was in 1947, however, that Andrews worked again with director Otto Preminger, with whom he would make three of his best films, the third being ’WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS’ of 1950, an outstanding ‘Film Noir’  we will speak of later.
But it was ‘DAISY KENYON’ of 1947 which brought out a further example of the relaxed, unconventional and liberal Dana Andrews role, as the suave, flexible lover and separated family man whose understanding and acceptance of his situation is reflected in the responsibility and pleasant care he still bestows on his children, while his wife chooses another man.
With ‘Daisy Kenyon’, Andrews sets a chic social example and standard of masculine sensitivity, outstanding by its lack of hysteria despite a personal crisis.
For 1947, this was way ahead of its time, and, like other films of that era, proves the sustained civilized influence of countless Hollywood films over half-a-century old.

Positive/negative masculinity
The key to most positive Dana Andrews roles lies in the maintenance of a positive inner strength which the male ego does not betray with aggressiveness, or substitute with an effeminate about-face, but rather sees beyond disappointments with the help of a cool, accommodating expression of the male identity, undaunted by the ups and downs of life.
On the other hand, Andrews was also able to show where the masculine ego and identity can misinterpret its strength and influence via self-deception, which, in turn, can lead to mental aberrations, and psychological or nervous breakdown.
We see the first memorable evidence of this in ‘BALL OF FIRE’ of 1942, where Dana Andrews, as the dapper, handsome but manipulative shifty conman and gangster boyfriend of playgirl Barbara Stanwyck, cannot believe she could leave him for the awkward, intellectual Gary Cooper, who is studying American slang.
As regards ‘Where The Sidewalk Ends’, Paul Schrader’s essay, ‘Notes on Film Noir’, aptly describes its overall theme as “The loss of public honour, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and finally psychic stability.”
Andrews, as the wayward cop whose personality is corrupted by the power at his disposal, acts out, convincingly, the physical and mental behaviour of a shifty, calculating man deceived by his possession of power. It is in such roles that the actor demonstrates the mental insecurities of his negative characters, whose uneasiness, hesitancy, opportunistic smiles etc, act as masks disguising an underlying mental illogic and weakness, beneath pompous masculine behaviour.

Andrews in summary
In general, it is mostly those cool screen roles where Andrews acts on the margins of leading characters — as in 1954’s ‘ELEPHANT WALK’, where, as the manager of a plantation in Ceylon, he objects to his employer’s desire to build on the traditional route of elephant herds — which reveal and preserve his sensitivity for generations of film viewers.
Whether as a professional lawyer, soldier, detective, pioneer, husband, father, Marshall, or just an ordinary working-class drifter, Dana Andrews’ screen career was a quiet achievement, portraying some of the best masculine values needed for better societies anywhere.