In an appreciation of Alan Rickman’s role in Die Hard, a cinema page I follow on Facebook relayed a factoid about the movie I hadn’t known. The basis for that movie was a novel that was a sequel to the novel that the Frank Sinatra movie, The Detective was based on. I’ve written before about how the oppressive static a gay kid growing up in the 60s/70s and later was one part vitriolic hate and the other part a kind of rancid pity. The Detective fits neatly into that other part. And the pity in that one is exceptionally rancid.

Released in the late 1960s The Detective was billed as a more “adult” crime drama, which after Preminger’s Advise and Consent in ’62 released the topic/plot device of homosexuality from its taboo status in movies as long as it still was…you know…taboo…The Detective tells a story of big city corruption, murder and suicide all tied together by…you guessed it, homosexuality.

It starts with a grisly murder of a man whose head was crushed and his dick cut off. New York City police detective Joe Leland, played by Frank Sinatra, figures it must have been the victim’s “roommate” because of course that’s what homosexuals do to each other. They track the roommate down and grill him and because he’s a bit of a nutcase (aren’t they all?) pressure him into confessing. He is executed for the crime.

Later a suicide across town gets the detective’s attention because the dead man’s wife thinks there was something more to it. The dead man, Colin MacIver (played by William Windom in flashbacks), is deeply involved in some sort of real estate corruption and the Powers That Be want the detective to back off the case.

It turns out MacIver really did commit suicide after all because he was…guess what…a closeted homosexual, and what is more he had in fact brutally murdered the victim at the beginning of the movie, not the roommate the detective sent to die the chair.

They play the tape recorded confession MacIver recorded for his therapist and in flashbacks, while William Windom, the actor playing Colin MacIver voices over, we see him first getting assaulted by some street thugs who call him a faggot, which inexplicably drives him to pickup a guy for sex at the docks.

William Windom played commodore Decker in the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine and you saw there what a first rate actor he was, and you really see it in the flashback scenes in The Detective where he plays the tormented homosexual who thinks “just one more time” will get it out of his system. As gobsmackingly awful as this movie is, I have to say Windom is stunning in those few scenes at the end of it. He makes you believe it:

The thought of turning, turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me and made me sick with anger. I went down there. I had heard about the waterfront. People giggle and make jokes about it. I had had only two experiences before, once in college and once in the Army. I thought I had gotten it out of my life, but I hadn’t.

I looked at them. Is this what I was like? Oh God, twisted faces, outcasts, lives lived in shadows always prey to a million dangers.

People don’t realize what we go through. I was raised in a family that would not even admit that there was such a thing as a homosexual in this world. And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop.

I thought if I could have just one night  I could get it out of my system. Just one more time.

That part about “People don’t realize what we go through” was supposed to make the movie more progressive in its attitude, but it’s really a barge load of rancid pity. I suppose in 1968 people thought we were lucky to get even that.

So…yeah…to say I’m surprised at the link between The Detective and Die Hard would be an understatement. The article says Sinatra was offered the detective role again for Die Hard but declined saying he was too old for it. So they rewrote the story to break the link with the previous novel and I think it’s better for it. Sinatra just would not have played it the way Bruce Willis did.

As a side note, I have a Mark and Josh cartoon I’ve been dawdling over for years to post eventually during an academy awards ceremony, that riffs on that bit of horrible self hating gay dialogue, with Mark holding a can of spray paint, chewing the scenery, telling his boyfriend tearfully that “the thought of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me and made me sick with anger” and “I thought if I could get it out of my system. Just one more time.” And he sobs into his hands and Josh says “Let me guess…you’ve been tagging Exodus billboards again” and Mark shrugs and says “Just a little” The last panel is an Exodus “I questioned homosexuality” billboard but now it’s all psychedelic and it says “I questioned reality…turn on tune in drop acid.”

I try to make lemonade out of the homophobic lemons life gives me however I can…