March 23, 1949— Detective Story, a gritty drama
featuring wisecracking, world-weary cops, petty crooks, eccentrics, and a secret that
shatters the calm of its New York station-house setting, premiered at Broadway’s
Hudson Theatre, beginning the first of 581 performances—as well as the squad-room
genre that would shortly become a mainstay of television.
The Manhattan melodrama’s run turned out to be the
second-longest in the career of playwright Sidney Kingsley, who had already won a Pulitzer Prize before the age of 30 for Men in White (itself a parent of another
TV genre, the medical show).
Nowadays, however, if it is known at all, it will
be primarily because of the excellent 1951 film adaptation, directed by William
Wyler and starring Kirk Douglas (pictured
here), which occasionally appears on Turner Classic Movies.
It’s not hard to see why the play is not performed
as frequently as it used to be:
*Its 30-plus speaking parts mean
a serious drain on the resources of Broadway houses, never mind Off-Broadway or
regional theaters.
*Its hard-boiled slang lies submerged not only under generations
of newer phrases but under profanity-laced dramas, across all entertainment media,
that make Kingsley’s squad room look like Disney World.
*The plot point once
considered explosive—abortion—is now no longer a criminal offense, and has even
ruled by the Supreme Court as a constitutional right.
*The cynical police reporter
and the Irish American-dominated squad room (including one officer, a law unto
himself who causes endless trouble for his by-the-book superior) are regarded as
cliched.
*The ending is simply seen as unbelievable.
It amuses me, then, after a rare revival is staged,
as it has, the last 15 years, in places such as Chicago or Canada’s Shaw
Festival, when the local reviewer praises it. Surely, it must be due to the efforts
of the director or crew on the hoary material, the review seems to imply—never the playwright.
To be sure, the drama does have its
problems—notably, that reporter, who comes on every once in a while to Tell the
Audience What To Think, as if it needs a reference to Captain Ahab to
understand that the protagonist is a vengeful obsessive, or that, for a
democracy to exist, the press, the people, the cops, and the courts must always
check on each other.
But the play lives
(as does Wyler’s largely faithful adaptation). Kingsley, a thoroughgoing
theater professional, painstakingly researched his dramas, then, because he
also usually directed them himself, just as painstakingly staged them. He
caught the way a station house could be filled with so much tedium that its
occupants would do almost anything to relieve it—until the point when, all of a
sudden, the premonitory joke that they are “ripe for a homicide” becomes a
terrifying reality.
If you want to understand how shows such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, or the various Law
and Order series (or, on the comic side, Barney Miller) have dominated network fare for so long, look no
further than Kingsley.
His play's title might have initially misled those who expected
a standard exercise in the detective as hyperrational problem solver.
But he
realized that the squad room could be more than a venue for ratiocination, even
for his stated hope of awakening postwar America to the dangers to democracy
spelled by unchecked, powerful investigatory units.
No, like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (which itself had
premiered on Broadway only the month before), Kingsley was translating the
conventions of ancient Greek tragedy for a modern audience.
I mean this in two senses. First, Kingsley strictly adhered to the classical unities
for tragedy set out by Aristotle, of time
(the plot occurs within 24 hours), space
(the single setting of the station house) and, arguably, action (subplots—except for the one involving a mousy female
shoplifter, played by an amazing Lee Grant—all contribute to the main
action).
Second, Kingsley, in effect, created a Sophoclean station house. Oedipus Rex has been called the first detective story, as a
guarantor of order follows a clue that will solve a mystery: a crime that is
imperiling the health of his city. Similarly, Lt. Jim McLeod of the 21st
Precinct pursues every lead that will put away an abortion doctor whose
incompetence has resulted in several deaths. Just as Oedipus blindly pursues
his quarry, unaware that the source of the pestilence and crime lies closely
than he ever could guess, a bewildered McLeod angrily disregards warnings that
his pursuit of the abortion doctor holds personal dangers for himself. McLeod
is even, in a sense, struggling through an oedipal conflict: resentment of his
father for mistreating his mother so badly that she ended up in an insane
asylum, a bitterness now so poisonous that he can’t compromise in any realm of
his life, whether in giving a break to suspects who have made a single mistake
or to the wife who has done likewise.
As with Kingsley’s other major foray into social
realism, Dead End (also adapted to
film by Wyler), ethnicity figures strongly into Detective Story.
Although Italians, Greeks, even African-Americans
are among the cast of characters, the lion’s share of the names reflects the heavy
representation of Irish-Americans on the New York City police at the time (and
even, to a somewhat diminished extent, to this day).
Though Kingsley was himself Jewish, most of his police
characters engage in a dialogue that pivots implicitly on the demands of
Christianity.
McLeod’s fury over his wife’s abortion and the
premarital love affair that preceded it seems overshadowed by his church’s
insistence that the act is a mortal sin.
But it is also part of a worldview in
which he is preternaturally disposed to mistrust all motives and to judge
rather than forgive. When he tells partner Lou Brody, “I am not a Christian,”
he is actually referring to his eye-for-an-eye mentality.
On the other hand, Brody
embodies the precepts of Christ probably as well as anyone in that workplace
can. His first appearance onstage is carrying in sandwiches for everyone, and
he comes by his empathy for the embezzlement suspect Arthur (whom McLeod insists
on prosecuting) because he sees something of his dead son in this decorated war veteran.
The final scene—McLeod’s death at the hands of a
suspect who has swiped a gun off an unsuspecting officer in the station house—fuses
the perspectives of Greek tragedy and Christianity.
The detective’s suffering (the
loss of his wife) and impending death leads to both an Aristotelian notion of
purification (catharsis) and a Christian one, as he atones for his former lack
of forgiveness by tearing up the complaint against Arthur.
Two members of the Broadway cast, Ralph Bellamy (who
lost out to Douglas when it came time to cast McLeod for the film) and Horace McMahon (who repeated his role as Lt. Monaghan, McLeod’s tough-but-fair boss),
went on to play cops on television (Bellamy, in Man Against Crime, aka Follow
that Man; McMahon, on Naked City).
In a sense, they were the first occupiers of ground carefully prepared by
Kingsley, who found, in the confined setting of a station house, outsized,
elemental emotions and themes dating back to the Greeks: fate, love, jealousy,
hatred, order and its discontents, anguished self-recognition, and mercy.
In
the process, he helped shape the template of the TV police procedural that made
the cops’ everyday stresses even more important than the clues and circumstances of a
particular case.
(A longtime resident of Bergen County, NJ, where I
come from, Kingsley remained active in the community long after his last play, Night Life, opened on Broadway in 1962. Partly
in tribute to wife Madge Evans, a child star in silent films made in Fort Lee, he became the founding chairman of New Jersey's Motion Picture and
Television Development Commission in 1977, charged with luring movie makers to
the state. This Oakland resident also made a big impression early in the life
of Ramapo College, where he visited and read plays submitted to one of its spring arts
festivals. A friend of mine who attended the school in those days recalled him
as a “gracious man” who preached the importance of researching the facts
surrounding a play so that they, along with the characters, become part of the
conflict.)
“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an
impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing
smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of
timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat
broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together
could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr.
Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman.
‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man
seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old
story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus
transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think;
for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face,
it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis
Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)
