Detective Story (1951)

An embittered cop leads a precinct of characters in their grim battle with the city's lowlife while wife Parker suffers from neglect. Based on Sydney Kingsley's Broadway play, this seminal movie was a prototype for everything from "Hill Street Blues" to "NYPD Blue." Academy Award Nominations: 4, including Best Director, Best Actress--Eleanor Parker, Best Screenplay. Product Description

Take a couple of drop-dead pills.

"Detective Story," made in 1951 in gritty Black & White, plays like the blueprint for just about every "Police Procedural" that's come after it, from England's "Z-Cars," and "The Sweeney," to "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue," even Sidney Lumet's superlative "Q & A," right up to "Law & Order SVU," and the seemingly endless iterations of "C.S.I."

In a downtown New York precinct, events and characters revolve around the resident cops who trade wisecracks, gallows humor, and a universal dislike of paperwork as they get on with the job of protecting Joe-Public from various assorted low-life's and ne'r-do-wells.

First up we have the hapless, nameless shoplifter who, when not trying to hit on the officer who arrested her, frets about disturbing her brand-new shyster brother-in-law - the first major role for Lee Grant. There's the good-kid-gone-bad, arrested for stealing from his employer by the tightly wound "Detective Jim McLeod," a searing performance by Kirk Douglas that rivals his sleaze-bag reporter "Chuck Tatum" in Billy Wilder's vicious expose of the newspaper business, "Ace in the Hole." And there's a star-making turn by Joseph Wiseman as the comically and explosively verbose, but dangerously unstable cat-burglar, "Charley Gennini." Wiseman's turn is equally as memorable as Richard Widmark's cackling psycho "Tommy Udo" in Henry Hathaway's Noir classic, "Kiss of Death," and Wiseman would later go on to everlasting fame as James Bond's original nemesis, "Dr No."

Throw in wonderful character actors such as William Bendix as McLeod's partner of 10yrs, now increasingly worried about his friends mental condition, Horace McMahon as his long-suffering Lieutenant, who can't seem to make up his mind whether to give him a medal or take his badge, George Macready as a particularly disreputable and disbarred "doctor," Michael Strong as Gennini's endlessly perplexed and dim-witted side-kick, and you have a wonderful cast who give the film everything they've got, and then some!

But the film belongs, from first frame to last, to Kirk Douglas and his portrayal of a cop who's teetering on the edge of the abyss. His rigid, unbending moral code, his contempt and loathing of the "criminal mind," and his seething hatred for one man in particular, threaten to drive him, and those around him, into a nihilistic hell of his own making. Douglas has always excelled at playing conflicted characters, and in McLeod he has a doozy! Because of his family history he's become trapped in an absolute black and white, no-shades-of-gray worldview that is destroying him; it drives him to pursue the mildest, most remorseful petty criminal with the same fervor and intensity as he would a psychotic mass murderer.

To Jim McLeod a crime is a crime is a crime, he's on the frontline of the war against the criminal masses, and there can be no quarter given! There's a telling scene between him and William Bendix's "Detective Lou Brody" where Brody asks, in fact practically begs, McLeod to let a petty thief go. The kid is young, from a good family, made a stupid mistake, and won't do it again; they both know that. You can see the agony in Douglas' face and hear it in his voice as he struggles with his own demons, he knows full well that his partner is right, that there's absolutely nothing to be gained by pursuing the case with a seemingly spiteful zeal. But at the same time he can't NOT book the kid and throw him headlong into the criminal justice system, which will almost certainly ruin his life, and it's tearing him apart from the inside.

Adapted from a stage play and set primarily in the main office of the precinct station, the film zips through its 103 minutes running time at a breathless pace, and we watch as events pile-up around Douglas' character with potentially disastrous consequences. For fans of Kirk Douglas, and "Police Procedurals" in general, this is a must-see, highly recommended!
August 25, 2008

IF IBSEN HAD WRITTEN A PLAY CALLED "A DETECTIVE'S HOUSE" . . .

Ever had the feeling you've seen something before--and that it was better before? Like the main plot of THE LION KING is a rip-off of HAMLET--and HAMLET is better? Try watching DETECTIVE STORY back-to-back with Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE. (Buying/renting Anthony Hopkins' and Claire Bloom's 1973 film version would be a handy way to do this.) It is almost uncanny how these two works center around the relationship between an uptight husband and a wife who has done something he totally freaks out about when he learns of it. Both these works show the husband realizing he has been wrong--and both end with that husband rejected and left by a wife who has seen a side of him that she cannot love or live with. Even the dialogue in their two blow-up and break-up scenes is so similar that one suspects DETECTIVE STORY of wearing "borrowed plumage."

Of course the purposes of these two works are different. Ibsen meant to present a thesis about women's rights, and he deliberately underscored it and left it bouncing around in people's heads by letting Nora's slamming of the front door be the final action in his play. DETECTIVE STORY was simply meant to provide its audience with an evening's entertainment--and the break-up of a cop's marriage was the main attraction for people to watch. (Mixed in and around this, we see pleasant, sordid, horrifying, and touching scenes about other people in the course of a "typical" day at a police precinct. In these, the big standouts are Lee Grant as a ditzy shoplifter and William Bendix as a sensible and compassionate cop who has recently lost his son in World War II.)

The out-of-date Freudian father-son psychology of DETECTIVE STORY is one reason I found it a little hard to take. Another was the reliance of Kirk Douglas's character on the physical abuse of prisoners to get "evidence" against them. (I know that at least 27 percent of Americans currently approve of this technique, but, speaking as a former police officer myself, I cannot accept it in a law-enforcement character I am meant to sympathize with.)

The chief flaw in DETECTIVE STORY is its final scene. Since the audience is supposed to be entertained rather than taught any lesson or given a wake-up call, the film's real-life question of "what does a man or woman do for an encore when a marriage ends?" is totally scrapped, and a kind of Heroic Fantasy Ending is pasted on (SPOILER ALERT): one of the perps in the precinct house grabs a cop's pistol, and Kirk Douglas's character leads the charge to get it back from him. Among other convoluted ironies, Douglas (who is Jewish in real life) is playing an Irish Catholic detective, who clearly has a death wish after his wife leaves. Does anyone else see his final action as suicide, which is a mortal sin in the character's religion? And yet the authors of the script clearly did NOT intend us to notice, let alone think about, that huge jagged plot hole. March 20, 2008

A gritty prototype. I see bits of Hill Street Blues in it.

This classic police mellow-drama is a perfect fit for the talents of young Kirk Douglas. He is an inflexible, angry cop. He is righteous with out compassion for any accused showing up at this rundown New York cop shop. They must be all guilty, otherwise they wouldn't be there. He has set himself up as jury & judge. There is one particular case that has haunted him for years. He consistently violates police procedure to say nothing of the law to apprehend those he believes to be guilty. One of his partners is William Bendix a kindly but tough cop. He is seeking mercy for one of Douglas' collars. He is inflexible & will hear none of it. Eleanor Powell plays Douglas' wife. She becomes involved in one of his cases which tests his principals. He does not handle it well. Things end badly very noir-like. See this if you like the police/detective tv shows of today. You'll recognize where some of their style came from. January 9, 2008

Detective Story

Before "Homicide" or "Hill Street Blues" came this gritty, hard-hitting cop drama based on Sidney Kingsley's play. Honed to tense perfection by Wyler, the film is a showcase for fine, colorful ensemble acting by William Bendix (as the no-nonsense lieutenant), Lee Grant (reprising her role as a mousy shoplifter), Bert Freed (as McLeod's sensitive partner), and Joseph Wiseman (as a hilariously "innocent" Italian burglar). But it's Douglas's fierce, tragic performance as a modern lawman who still sees the world in stark black and white terms that provides the gut-twisting dramatic ironies. Absorbing and devastating, this "Story" gets under your skin and stays there. June 25, 2007

Great vehicle for Kirk Douglas' acting talents

Kirk Douglas has always excelled in roles where he plays the maverick loner, walking the fine line between anger and insanity. Thus his role as Det. Jim McLeod in "Detective Story" is a real showcase for his acting talents. This is not a crime drama in the conventional sense where there is any real action or crime to solve, even though you have a room full of New York City police detectives on screen for just about the whole movie. Instead it is a character study of Jim McLeod, played by Kirk Douglas. McLeod's motivation in his work is not to solve crimes or even protect the innocent. Instead, he is motivated by a desire to root out evil by his definition of the word. Evil is something McLeod claims that anyone can easily spot. McLeod's world view doesn't differentiate between the one-time bad act of a basically good person, such as Arthur Kindred (Craig Hill), a young man who impulsively stole from his employer in a last ditch attempt to impress a girl he believed he loved, versus the misdeeds of a lifetime criminal, such as the homicidal maniac Charlie (Arthur Kindred), that has also been apprehended by the detective squad that same day.

When confronted by a mistake in the past of the person nearest to him, his own wife, McLeod is equally unforgiving. His rage and disgust is so great, you're not sure what bothers him more - the discovery of his wife's past or the failure of his own nose to sniff out the misdeed prior to this. By the time McLeod realizes his own inflexibility and lack of empathy have cost him what he loves the most, it is too late to undo the damage, and this leads to one last tragedy.

This is Douglas in perhaps his finest if not most huggable role, and is recommended viewing for that reason alone. William Bendix makes up for the lack of likeabilty in Douglas' character as Detective Lou Brady, who likes to temper the letter of the law with a little humanity. Then there's a very young Lee Grant as a shoplifter who just can't stop babbling. Finally, there's Horace McMahon as Lieutenant Monaghan, head of the detective squad and the kind of boss we'd all like to have. There are no extras included on this DVD. March 14, 2007

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