William Berke's Street of Sinners 1957

 To paraphrase Sam Peckinpah, a Western can be anything and anything can be a Western.  William Berke made 90 films in his 20-year career and most of them were B Westerns with 12-day shooting schedules and budgets of around $100,000, which brings us to Street of Sinners, a film about crime and juvenile delinquency that has some of the trappings of the Western, with cars instead of horses.  Fortyish George Montgomery plays a rookie cop out to reform a corrupt street, controlled by bar owner Nehemiah Persoff, who serves liquor to minors and recruits teenage girls for prostitution.  This gritty film uses a very limited amount of sets, which are lit and photographed by cinematographer J. Burgi Contner for maximum sleazy effect (he was the cinematographer for Edgar Ulmer's Moon Over Harlem in 1939).  This cynical film holds out little hope for the girls and boys on the street, a number of whom die -- by suicide or murder -- or for the cops who want to clean things up.