[Originally published in Movietone News 35, September 1974]
Detective Story is a precinct-house Oedipus Rex; and though I have neither seen nor read Sidney Kingsley’s original play, I am certain that the Attic overtones are his work, not that of Yordan and Wyler. In the film, Kirk Douglas puts in one of his finest performances as the uncompromising, obsessive detective who learns, reluctantly, and to his horror, that his crusade against evil swings past the wide assortment of criminals who come daily to precinct headquarters to be questioned and booked and ultimately focuses on himself. Oedipus’s relentless inquisitiveness is equally divided between Detective McLeod (Douglas) and his gruff supervisor (Horace McMahon). Teiresias appears as a lawyer (Warner Anderson), in possession of key evidence but reluctant to share the truth he knows. Iocasta is McLeod’s wife, with a carefully guarded secret about her past (ineptly played by the miscast Eleanor Parker, in the only job of acting in the film that falls short of splendid). Even the shepherd, who gives the final bit of evidence that seals Oedipus’s doom, appears in the person of an oily racketeer (Gerald Mohr) who shares Mrs. McLeod’s secret. The film also boasts an assortment of messengers and a Chorus of helpful fellow detectives who place McLeod’s suffering in perspective. But, though the unities are generally maintained, the turgid ritualism of Greek tragedy is exchanged for a seriocomic realism by the introduction of a most interesting and well-played bunch of pathetics and grotesques: the witnesses and arrestees of an evening’s work in the precinct.
