Detective Story, 1951, is actually a lousy film because it portrays the police in the worst possible light. Kirk Douglas is especially heinous in how he treats everyone, including his wife, as pariahs who don't deserve anything but condemnation. If this is how the police behaved in 1951 then it was high time to change them. Everyone is type cast here.

I will admit before I watched this I checked the reviews. IMDB gave it 7.6 rating which is excellent. Now I have watched it and I think the rating should move up to 8.0. Why am I so Impressed. Well, Kirk Douglas is great a the detective and William Bendix is great as his partner. The movie revolves around Kirk Douglas and it like a day out of his life. What a day he is in for. Now enough about plot details. If you feel this is not a worthy 8.0 movie, then write your review and give me the old one two punch.

Like Oedipus Rex, if Oedipus was a cop at Barney Miller's precinct. One of the characters has had an abortion. Let me repeat, an A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N. Sorry, but that feels good, after the hinting around this movie does. The most anyone says is "the child was born dead." Which is the point of an abortion, no? Yet Detective Story was advanced for its day, and is more frank than many modern films. Kirk Douglas portrays a teeth-gnashingly, gut-twistingly sad bigot, the role he was born for, obviously. To my knowledge, he is the first American male star of the sound era to cry openly, on screen.