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A correlation with Preminger is to be noted, Where the Sidewalk Ends goes in and The Man with the Golden Arm comes out. A day in the 21st Precinct Police Station, a bullpen for flatfoot and lawbreaker and "John Q. Public" to mingle, "an impersonal business" taken very personally by the seething detective (Kirk Douglas). An abusive criminal father lies at the root of his torment, his white whale is the illicit abortionist (George Macready) whose past patients include the cop's tremulous wife (Eleanor Parker). "A monument," he's called by alarmed colleagues, crumbling in plain sight. "You're digging your own grave. It's right there in front of you. One more step and you're in it." Kleptomaniac (Lee Grant) and ganef (Joseph Wiseman) have their own contortions on the margins of the deep-focus arena, the callow embezzler (Craig Hill) and his adoring waif (Cathy O'Connell) meanwhile depend on the mercy of a fellow detective (William Bendix). "The world is crying for a little heart." The Dead End formulation updated, a pungent Sidney Kingsley terrarium polished by William Wyler for the proper Broadway experience. A busy set, rolling chairs and swinging doors, desks like isles in a histrionic stream—Grant's insinuating melancholy, Wiseman's ethnic kabuki, Macready's pinched seaminess. Above all, Douglas' agonized strut blurring the line between driven principle and authoritarian psychosis. "Give you a badge, and you try to push the world around." (The imagistic language reaches some kind of apex as the protagonist wishes out loud for a faucet to wash off the "dirty pictures" in his tainted cerebellum.) It builds to the hollow man embracing a hoodlum's bullets, a Pietà "in the line of duty." Siegel's Madigan is a key midpoint in the transition to Lumet in the Seventies. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Horace McMahon, Gladys George, Gerald Mohr, Frank Faylen, Michael Strong, Luis Van Rooten, Bert Freed, Warner Anderson, and Grandon Rhodes. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |