WILLIAM WYLER #1: DON'T SAY THE A WORD, DETECTIVE STORY

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DETECTIVE STORY

Season 13’s 4x4 has reached its 1/2way point with our 9th of 16 movies and a new director, provisional co-host Ryan’s pick of the 15-time Academy Award-nominated, 3-time Oscar-winning director William Wyler. This week, we cover the first of Ryan’s four curated Wyler flicks DETECTIVE STORY (1951). 

Up for four Academy Awards, including Best Director, but winning none, Detective Story was Wyler’s 22nd talkie and his earliest we’re covering the for the pod (the directorial powerhouse also shot about thirty silent films prior the talkies and two documentaries during WWII when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces). Like many of Wyler’s works, the picture was adapted from a successful contemporary play and stars Kirk Douglas (Spartacus nine years later) in the main role of Detective Jim McLeod with stage roles reprised both by Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No eleven years later) as a booked burglar who goes (SPOILER) for a gun and by Lee Grant (featured on TGTPTU seventy-two years later and amazing always) as a flighty shoplifter in a performance that would win her Best Actress at Cannes.   

As a play adaptation, Detective Story is staged almost as a bottle movie, escaping its second-floor New York City precinct set only to introduce main characters in the opening minutes and for an aborted car ride. Speaking of abortion, the film’s creative team couldn’t under the Hays Code. This silencing through censorship changed a major component of the play when adapted, namely when Detective McLeod who sees in black-and-white (morally, not just because of the film stock) confronts the messiness of the gray world in his pursuit of a doctor’s medical malpractice manslaughter during a birth gone bad and, subsequently, upon learning of his wife’s secret life prior to knowing him when she’d used the same doctor’s services for...

So join the boys as they kick off Big Willy Winter with Ryan parodying the Fresh Prince lyrics; Ken maps Inspector Harold Francis Callahan (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) onto Det. McLeod; Tom gets thirsty for Lee Grant; and Jack stays awake. And keep subscribing and following for next week’s pairing with The Desperate Hours.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias