The great detective leans over the body on the floor of the overdecorated flat. "I think I'm going to be sick," says his young assistant. "No, you're not," the detective tells him. "Tense your muscles and take notes: nude Caucasian male, penis cut off and lying on floor, head crushed, multiple stab wounds, index finger and thumb of right hand missing . . ."
It's a great beginning—especially since Detective Joe Leland is Frank Sinatra, playing it cool and tough, with hardly ever a smile on his sad, slightly sagging face. The corpse on the floor is none other than Theodore Leikman Jr., homosexual scion of a big-city big shot, and the first problem is to find his roommate, identity unknown. Joe, who has just solved two homicides in one week and is in line for promotion to lieutenant despite his contemptuous treatment of political brass, is soon cruising the gay bars, thrusting a police drawing in the fags' faces and asking, "Do you know this man?"
Things get a little ridiculous with a raid on a trailer truck, in which a score of pretty boys and a silver-haired gent in a Homburg seem to be having a pitch-dark love-in. But the movie picks up again with a moving, gut-tightening scene in which Joe extracts a confession from the roommate, beautifully played by Tony Musante. By cracking the case, Joe makes lieutenant at last.
Meanwhile, back in private life, all is not so well. Joe and his wife Karen (Lee Remick) split up. That is bad enough, but then it turns out that she is a nymphomaniac who likes to pick up guys in bars. His world is coming apart, and so is the movie—with a rush of irrelevancies about slum conditions and precinct-house rivalries. Suddenly, a complex new subplot is folded into the proceedings, about a financial wheeler-dealer who commits suicide.
The financier's wife is played by a sleek, sweet dream from England named Jacqueline Bisset. Her screen debut in the part originally scheduled for Mia Farrow—before she walked out on the movie and on Sinatra—is one of The Detective's redeeming features. Otherwise, this police epic peters out in aimless diffusion and in some of the most absurd juxtapositions of Manhattan and California location shots ever seen.