William Wyler (1951)
Detective Story is an adaptation of a successful Broadway play of 1949 by Sidney Kingsley. William Wyler has the confidence to live with the constraints on movement dictated by the stage origins of the piece – there’s remarkably little opening out of the action – and the skill to make a dramatic virtue of the largely unchanging set, a New York police station. The spirit of place he creates gets across the boredom and the continuously dangerous edge of working there. The routine is oppressive but fragile, because of what could happen, and the few eruptions of violence – whether yelling voices or physical assaults – have real impact. Wyler’s previous film, The Heiress, was one of his very best. Detective Story doesn’t, unlike that film, have great acting in it but Wyler’s orchestration of the cast is superb. The characterisations are consistently rich and the variety of rhythms in the exchanges between characters is very pleasing. All the cops are good – Horace McMahon, Frank Faylen, Bert Freed and, especially, William Bendix, whose naturalness and depth transcend the obvious and limited conception of the character of Lou Brody. His son died in action in World War II; Brody feels sympathetic towards a young man, well played by Craig Hill, who’s charged with theft and who’s the same age as Brody’s son would now have been.
It takes a little time to get your bearings with Detective Story. What’s so clever about Wyler’s direction is that seeming shortcomings in the initial stages turn into major strengths of the film. As a spinster shoplifter, Lee Grant seems a shade too theatrical when she first arrives in the station and there’s not much else happening there yet. But she’s completely in tune with the (unnamed) woman’s slightly forlorn eccentricity and she stays thoroughly in character. By the time she leaves the premises after things there have got much more complicated and troubling, you’re very sorry to see Grant go: it’s a beautiful piece of acting. Although the story holds your interest from the outset, it lacks a focus – until you realise the connections between the several threads of the plot, and that the number of things going on is essential to the atmosphere and changes in tempo. The converse effect is what stops Detective Story from being even better than it is. A focus does gradually develop. It’s on a morally uncompromising detective, Jim McLeod, who believes that all wrongdoers should be punished and that a criminal suspect is almost certainly a wrongdoer. McLeod shows a more yielding side in his love for his wife Mary. The only sadness in their otherwise perfect marriage is her continuing inability to conceive. It’s necessary, of course, for Jim to be punished for his brutal moralism; and for Mary and a personal history he didn’t know about to generate that punishment, and reveal Jim’s own unhappy past.
As the couple’s relationship increasingly takes centre stage (and that it is the phrase for it), the script gets wordier and clichéd. (It’s adapted from the Kingsley play by Philip Yordan and Robert Wyler, the director’s older brother.) The problem is made worse by Eleanor Parker in the role of the wife. She’s unusually tolerable in her early scenes (so much so I had to look twice to check it was her) but, once Mary starts suffering, Parker, even under Wyler’s direction, is back to her stiffly histrionic self. It’s hard to believe that proper Mary ever had sex outside marriage with anyone – and Parker doesn’t remotely suggest that her properness is a front. I also got confused about Mary’s shameful connection with a New Jersey doctor (George Macready), a man her husband takes a particular dislike to: it seems that she must have had an abortion yet there are references to her illegitimate child being stillborn[1]. Kirk Douglas in the role of Jim McLeod is, however, a big compensation. He gives a performance of force and commendable empathy. An impossible load of bitter (self-)recrimination is required of him by the end but it’s quite something that so much of it seems genuinely felt. The casting of Douglas is acute in any case. His natural rapport with the audience makes McLeod’s harsh moral intransigence challenging – you can’t stand back from it the way you could if someone less engaging were in the role (or if Kirk Douglas had himself stood back from the character). As Charley Gennini, a recidivist thief, Joseph Wiseman (who, like Lee Grant, had played his role on stage) is acting in a very different style but his vocal and gestural exaggeration pushes Charley far enough over the top to take him somewhere beyond, and make him alarming.
3 May 2012
[1] All was explained on Wikipedia – as follows: ‘During production, the film had some trouble with the Production Code Authority. The Production Code did not allow the killing of police officers or references to abortion. Joseph Breen suggested that explicit references to abortion would be altered to “baby farming”. However, when the film was released, film critics still interpreted Dr Schneider as an illicit abortionist. Breen and William Wyler suggested to the MPAA Production Code Committee that the code be amended to allow the killing of police officers if it was absolutely necessary for the plot. They agreed and the code was amended, lifting the previous ban on cop killing’.
