The Detective

Here’s a movie a bit ahead of its time. It doesn’t follow just one story, but episodes in the life of a cop who really tries to do the right thing among all the political pressures on him. He is, in the end, unable to, but he gives it his best shot. Sinatra is very good. And I think it was really groundbreaking in another respect. It shows the furtive world of the contemporary homosexual in a sympathetic light. One cop is eager to bash the “faggots,” but Sinatra restrains him. Yes, the world shown is rather pathetic … but wasn’t it? Through no fault of the gay men themselves, but from the fact that they had to hide themselves, and were so utterly rejected. We’re a long ways from total acceptance, but we’ve come a hell of a distance since then. Of course, it is stereotyping to a degree. I didn’t know, for instance, that all gay men wore either pastel sweaters or leather jackets. The breakthrough, in a way, was that the movie dealt with gays and the gay scene at all, and did not condemn them.