Detective Story (1951)

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Detective Story is a solid film-noir police drama that doesn't much venture out beyond the office.It was almost like a television series in nature. The dialogue and the acting is superb, except for the jewel thieves Charlie and Lewis, they are bloody awful. I love many films that take place in one setting, so I'd say what the film was mostly lacking is substance. It kicked up a notch in the last 40 minutes or so, mostly due to Kirk Douglas's intensified presence and Cathy O'Donnell's involvement. Her character was truly splendid, bring back the Cathy's of the world please. I thought Detective Dakis added some needed humour also.

Powerful, and i would say even more so, when it first came out drama. A ll the more remarkable in that for most of the time, it takes place on one set, a police station. Almost like a filmed play, which it was based upon.The acting from almost every one in the cast is good, especially Kirk Douglas who gives one of his ultimate trademark " Angry young man"portrayals and Eleanor Parker is nearly as good as his wife with a secret or two. I may be a little biased as i am a big Kirk Douglas fan, nobody could do the " simmering anger bubbling beneath the surface" part like him.A very under rated actor,a very good film, that can still pack a punch.

I just saw this great black and white movie for the first time last night. What a powerful movie and what a great cast!!! If someone had told me that this movie was a William Wyler movie, I would not have believed him, since it is so different from his other movies. Basically set in the intake and holding room of one NYC police precinct, it presents a large and diverse cast of powerful stories about miscreants (or would be miscreants) in a one basic location. This movie received Oscar nominations for: Best Actress--Elenor Parker Best Supporting Actres--Lee Grant in her first motion picture Best Director----William Wyler and Best Writing, Screenplay--Philip Yordan & Robert Wyler Is this movie the first of it kind in bringing many characters into (basically) a single room?? Kirk Douglas was at his best, as far as his raw physical acting is concerned. It came out about the same year as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. William Bendix also gives one of his best performances here too. Lee Grant is in the room for shoplifting a $6 purse. She is great as an "observer" of all the things going on around her as she waits to be "booked." In that way, she acts as sort of a Greek chorus to the main events. If I had seen this movie as an 8-year-old kid, I would have totally missed the wonderful magic of the movie and the way it was constructed. One of the central parts of the story has to do with illegal abortion, yet the word "abortion" is never used in the movie and probably would have been misunderstood if it had been. In 1951, probably few people even talked about.

I really felt that Detective Story was unbalanced in that the first hour or so was filled with seemingly gratuitous slapstick comedy. In fact, the purse-snatching, husband-seeking woman and the duo of "four-time losers" reminded me, respectively, of Laverne and Shirley, and their regrettable counterparts Lennie and Squiggy. After about an hour, the production suddenly morphed into an intense, almost painful investigation into the morality of forgiveness and redemption. Wow, what a metamorphosis. The opening seemed to be just another good-humored crime story filled with flawed detectives hunting down despicable scoundrels. But by the end the whole story had become as serious as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I'm not sure how this could have been improved except by eliminating all of the slapstick. Of course, then it would no longer have been entertainment. Were movie-goers in 1951 really ready for this sort of hard-hitting moral didacticism?I am quite sure that the issues treated, abortion and the mistakes made by the young women who seek out abortionists, were daring for the time. Remarkably, still today, more than sixty years later, people are arguing about whether women who become pregnant have a right not to bear a child. Wyler clearly sides with Roe v. Wade (twenty years ahead of its time...), while simultaneously airing reservations about the potential for unscrupulous abortionists who terminate late-stage pregnancies and sometimes the would-have-been mothers as well.