Disappointment Story

Well, I just got finished watching the DVD I most anticipated since it came out in December: Detective Story. I saw the play it was based on lo these many years ago my first year of college, and it deeply affected me. I've had a minor obsession with it ever since. I've wanted to direct it both on stage and film, maybe even write something based on it. I am more determined now, since the film version we have could so obviously be improved upon.

Maybe I feel betrayed that apparently one could get away with far more on stage than one could on screen, which I suppose I could blame on the Hayes Code. Maybe it's just my Shakespearean obsession with preserving the original text of a work (if you think my review here is trenchant, you should see me savage non-Branagh Shakespeare adaptations). Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations.

So what really stuck in my craw? It wasn't Kirk Douglas. He was pretty much perfect. Most of the actors were pretty good, even if I thought some of the character choices they made were melodramatic to the point of being almost awful. The first thing was when McCleod calls his wife a "tramp." In the play it's "whore," and it's a much stronger choice, and justifies what happens later much better that some half-assed word like "tramp." Second, the Italian thief is played as a complete nut job, which doesn't make what happens at the end nearly as shocking and generally is distracting to other performances. As a script thing, he keeps mentioning that he's a "four-time loser" so many times that the audience is bludgeoned with it the way they aren't in the play. One of my biggest gripes is the handling of the adaptation in general: they didn't trust the audience enough. The character of Joe, the reporter, is pretty much eviscerated and his Jewishness erased. But the biggest thing? The thing that almost made me write the movie off completely before finishing? Mary didn't have an illegal operation. She went to a "baby farm." No. No. No. NO. She had an ABORTION in the play, but I guess the pantywaists at Paramount Studios couldn't handle it. It fuels everything that happens in the main storyline after it's revealed, but they had to bowdlerize it to get the material past the censors, I suppose. It's very disappointing.

All is not lost. Perhaps I should save up my pennies to produce this show. Perhaps I should call up the head of my undergraduate department, who was rumored to put Detective Story in the running for production by the school every year, and tell him to grow some cojones and direct it before I, his idiot student, do. Or maybe I could come up with a new screenplay (as soon as I learn how to write one) and get a film friend to direct it. Or come up with my own riff on it. I guess the movie couldn't have been all that bad to instigate such a creative storm. I credit the source material entirely. That's Detective Story by Sidney Kingsley, if you feel like looking it up.