The Detective

Part of the Film Noir genre is the romance angle with a powerful female lead. This neo-noir fails on that point offering a watered down, trifling character portrayed by a non-threatening Lee Remick, whose eyes the director seems obsessed with capturing long expressionless shots of. Sinatra's acting is fine, but the film technique... I can't explain how it makes him seem uncool, and the character of Leland is extremely cool and wildly open-minded for the time. Trouble is, they go very far out of their way to make him seem at once overly modern, and decidedly anchored in his values. Doesn't work. I didn't care for the camera work at all. A brilliant performance by Tony Musante as the basket-case ex-lover of the murdered gay man in the opening sequence is dminished by not properly photographing it. Great story and plot. Very sadly executed in a "message over story" way.

Excellent film with Frank Sinatra as a police officer with a conscience and a heart. This picture is riveting in that it exposes a city and its police department for corruption and anti-gay bias. Lee Remick is the enigma in this gritty film. She plays Sinatra's wife, an orphan who became a psychology professor, but yet has some pretty severe emotional hang-ups. The Police Department honors its own when they produce. It seems as if the Department couldn't care less how the results are retrieved. The film also offers a strong criticism of the death penalty. Emotional factors of the defendant were ignored here and a tragedy resulted. The picture ties in the killing of an innocent man and corruption of city officials very well. The fear of being labeled a homosexual is still another theme in this remarkable film.

An old fashioned, sometimes silly, but altogether decent and moral little film. The isolated accusation of homophobia present elsewhere in the list of reviews is not accurate. This assumption might be made from watching only the first few minutes of the film, when certain suspicions arise, but as the film develops those suspicions turn out to be quite ungrounded and in fact the Sinatra character openly defends gay characters from a homophobic cop, and so on. Throughout this movie the hero has actual moral integrity and refuses to abandon it, most of the time, and if he does it is not glorified. This in itself makes it worth watching just the once, given the general state of other films in the genre.