Maybe Detective Story worked on Broadway, but by the time it reached the screen pretty much at the apex of the contemporaneous noir cycle it must have come across as stagy and stale. (If it didn't then, it sure does now.) And of course this bolt of fustian was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (it's just the sort of all-star, self-important drama that would be feted), garnering Oscar nominations for its director, William Wyler, its screenplay and two of its actresses, Eleanor Parker and Lee Grant (none won). But now it looks embalmed compared to other movies that, in 1951, were barely acknowledged Ace in the Hole (The Big Carnival),Cry Danger, He Ran All The Way, The People Against O'Hara, Roadblock, The Racket.
Play and movie serve up a slice of life cut from the squad room of a New York City precinct. The slice contains several toppings: The quirky (Grant as a `booster,' or shoplifter), the poignant (Craig Hill as a clean-cut embezzler, Cathy O'Donnell as the girl who loves him), and the vicious (Frederic Wiseman as an ethnic burglar). Rounding out the law-and-order roster are William Bendix as Douglas' partner (Bendix alternated between oafish roles and salt-of-the-earth types; this is the latter) and Frank Faylen, a dry shelter of restraint in this monsoon of overacting (Wiseman's the worst offender, but the star of the film makes him sweat for the title).
Kirk Douglas is that star, and the spine of the plot is his vindictive pursuit of George Macready, a lousy abortionist (his patients die). Douglas is rigid and righteous, not to mention short of fuse; Chief of Detectives Horace McMahon is forever warning him to simmer down. When Douglas sends Macready to the hospital, McMahon investigates the roots of the antagonism. He brings in Douglas' wife (Parker) who has a past of which her husband is at first ignorant and finally unforgiving....
Douglas is offered up as a man beset by demons, among them his dead father, but there's so little background divulged that it's no more than a Freudian tease. At the end, several story lines converge melodramatically and clumsily, culminating with a literal and metaphorical Act of Contrition. It's a case where the downbeat ending a good, old-fashioned Greek catharsis doesn't atone for the writing, acting and movie-making sins that led up to it.
Play and movie serve up a slice of life cut from the squad room of a New York City precinct. The slice contains several toppings: The quirky (Grant as a `booster,' or shoplifter), the poignant (Craig Hill as a clean-cut embezzler, Cathy O'Donnell as the girl who loves him), and the vicious (Frederic Wiseman as an ethnic burglar). Rounding out the law-and-order roster are William Bendix as Douglas' partner (Bendix alternated between oafish roles and salt-of-the-earth types; this is the latter) and Frank Faylen, a dry shelter of restraint in this monsoon of overacting (Wiseman's the worst offender, but the star of the film makes him sweat for the title).
Kirk Douglas is that star, and the spine of the plot is his vindictive pursuit of George Macready, a lousy abortionist (his patients die). Douglas is rigid and righteous, not to mention short of fuse; Chief of Detectives Horace McMahon is forever warning him to simmer down. When Douglas sends Macready to the hospital, McMahon investigates the roots of the antagonism. He brings in Douglas' wife (Parker) who has a past of which her husband is at first ignorant and finally unforgiving....
Douglas is offered up as a man beset by demons, among them his dead father, but there's so little background divulged that it's no more than a Freudian tease. At the end, several story lines converge melodramatically and clumsily, culminating with a literal and metaphorical Act of Contrition. It's a case where the downbeat ending a good, old-fashioned Greek catharsis doesn't atone for the writing, acting and movie-making sins that led up to it.