Detective Story (Paramount) is the latest in the current harvest of high-quality movies that have been transplanted from the stage or the library (see CURRENT & CHOICE). Though the film rarely ventures out of the single indoor set that housed Sidney Kingsley's 1949 Broadway hit, Detective Story makes an even better movie than a play.
The picture chronicles a busy day in the detective squad room of a Manhattan station house. The room swirls with traffic: hoodlums, crackpots, mouthpieces, sharpies; the meek, the mulcted, the outraged. The detectives, unlike those in Hollywood's endlessly filmed games of cops & robbers, look like real cops under the strain of a tough, often nasty, grind; they grumble, sweat and suffer.
The one who suffers most is Detective McLeod (Kirk Douglas), a stickler for justice untempered by mercy, who bears down on a confused first offender as sadistically as he hounds a criminal abortionist. His life is dedicated in about equal parts to the remorseless pursuit of wrongdoers and to the love of his young wife (Eleanor Parker). Then he learns that she was one of the abortionist's patients before he married her.
Producer-Director William (The Best Years of Our Lives) Wyler wisely junks the play's long speeches designed to draw parallels between McLeod's rigid zeal and the evils of the police state. Apart from a few other changes to tone down the facts of underworld life, he leaves the play intact, and includes some of its ablest original performers: Lee Grant, hilarious as a man-hungry shoplifter who seems to have stepped right off the subway; Horace McMahon, who makes the squad commander solidly true to life; Joseph Wiseman, playing a degenerate fourth offender with chilling accuracy; and Michael Strong, as Wiseman's slack-jawed crony.
The rest of Detective Story's large cast, featuring William Bendix in a straight role as McLeod's older detective-partner, rounds out a lively gallery of Manhattan squadroom characters. For the first time since Champion, Kirk Douglas gets his teeth into a part tough enough to absorb all his biting intensity. Even more impressive, because it is less expected, is the remarkably well-shaded performance that Director Wyler draws out of Actress Parker in the difficult role of the detective's wife.
Bannerline (MGM) is a limp little melodrama about a brash cub reporter (Keefe Brasselle) who, to cheer up the dying days of an idealistic teacher (Lionel Barrymore), bestirs a town to clean up its gangster-ridden government. Cast inevitably as a crotchety but lovable tyrant, Actor Barrymore gets a chance to play a deathbed scene which, running intermittently through the whole picture, must be the longest on record.