DETECTIVE STORY (1951)

Based on a popular play of the same name (which from 1949 to 1950 ran for 581 performances on Broadway and featured Ralph Bellamy as the lead actor!  Holy fook!  I bet that was awesome!!!), DETECTIVE STORY tells the story of one day in the life of NYC police Det. Jim McLeod (Kirk Douglas).  Instead of following him around town, the events in DS are completely based around the detective's bullpen at the police station.  That sounds risky, but it's not, because DETECTIVE STORY is riveting from beginning to end.  Mainly thanks to the mature script and the intense performances by the entire cast.  And what a cast!  I just spent the last two hours going through the IMDb profiles of the films cast and crew.  That was a lot of fun.

The film opens with a detective bringing in a shoplifter.  From there, we're introduced the the layout of the police station and the fascinating cast of characters.  As the story moves along, more and more characters walk in and out of the film. There's a number of minor stories, but the main story concerns Detective McLeod and his dogged investigation of abortionist Dr. Karl Schneider (played by George Macready, who you might remember paired off against Douglas again six years later in Kubrick's masterful PATHS OF GLORY).  McLeod might hate Schneider now, but that ain't nothing compared to how much he hates him by the end of the movie! 

All of the "lesser" stories are interesting, but the person that really grabbed my attention was accused burglar Joseph Wiseman.  He might only be suspected of robbing houses, but one thing he's definitely guilty of is stealing scenes in the movie!  Holy shit, every single times he's on camera I couldn't take my eyes off of him!  He was amazing.  I'm not saying that to take away from the rest of the cast, cause everybody was great.  Wiseman just happened to be extra great.

One of the most impressive things about DETECTIVE STORY is the amount of information that's so effortlessly given to the audience.  The filmmakers did an amazing job of keeping multiple things going onscreen for the majority of the film.

By today's standards, DETECTIVE STORY is dated, but it's still a great film that deserves to be seen and admired.  Highly recommended.  Would make a very confusing double-feature with Takashi Miike's DETECTIVE STORY.

Very interesting attention to detail (and maybe even foreshadowing?) at 44:39, when Kirk Douglas goes to ask Joseph Wiseman about the monogrammed dish.

THE SWARM (1978)

Twenty-two million bees versus seven Oscar winners.

Celebrity-filled disaster movies were a big deal in the 1970's and THE SWARM definitely fits the bill for having a star-studded cast, but that story...ugh!  Clocking in at a unforgivable 155 minutes(!!!), THE SWARM opens with a military unit (lead by Richard Widmark) investigating a possible attack on a missile base.  Inside they find all of the soldiers dead and a lone civilian (Michael Caine) walking around looking smug.  That's pretty suspicious, but the explanation is quite clear: killer bees.  Duh!  Fast-forward a little bit and the city of Houston is threatened by millions of killer bees that have already wiped out a ton of people on their destructive path across Texas (which for some reason looks a lot like California). The military's solution is to the burn the entire city down with flamethrowers.

THE SWARM was a box office bomb (budget: $21m, ticket sales: $10m) when it was first unleashed into theaters and I can see why.  The story is dumb as hell, the pace is murder, the special effects are lame as fook, the bee attack scenes are goofy, the direction by Irwin Allen is abysmal and worst of all: it's straight up depressing to see such legendary classic Hollywood actors lowering themselves to appear in this turkey.  This was Fred MacMurray's last film for Christ's sake!  From DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE APARTMENT to THE SWARM.  Sad.  On the other hand, it was kinda cool to see Richard Widmark shooting a flamethrower while covered in bees.

I also passed the time by playing a connect the dots movie game with the cast.  For example: GONE WITH THE WIND (Olivia De Havilland) to TERRORVISION (Alejandro Rey).  BLAZING SADDLES (Slim Pickens) to GOLDMEMBER (Michael Caine).  MULHOLLAND DRIVE (Lee Grant) to DEADLY PREY (Cameron Mitchell).  TERRORVISION (Alejandro Rey) to DEADLY PREY (Cameron Mitchell) to SURF II (Morgan Paull)!!!!! Or how about DONNIE DARKO (Katherine Ross) to AIRPORT '77 (Lee Grant) which could then jump to Jimmy Stewart in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and HARVEY. That's interesting since both DONNIE DARKO and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE are about suicide/visions of a alternative world and both DONNIE DARKO and HARVEY feature a large imaginary rabbit character. Yes, I was bored while watching this movie.

Michael Caine yelling and butting heads with Richard Widmark nonstop, flamethrowers inside a building, plot holes left and right, incorrect geography, cheap looking sets, dated special effects, overacting, horrendous dialogue, a potted plant on the outside of a skyscraper, Olivia De Havilland scream-moaning, Michael Caine and Henry Fonda having a conversation while their faces are like four inches apart, passenger cars on a train falling off a mountain (near Houston!) and exploding (...what would explode on a normal train car?), nighttime switching to daytime in the same scene (ambulance wreck scene), doors opening twice, dead body breathing, people stung to death with no visible wounds and guy pressing in a code on a keypad but missing the buttons.

Worth a watch for fans of cheesy movies. You'll definitely get a few chuckles out of it.  As negative as the review sounded, I actually like this movie quite a bit.

Poster for THE TOWERING INFERNO.

I guess this actor couldn't see because he's pressing the area next to the actual buttons.

The sign on the store window says "Clarance" but in the end credits Fred MacMurray's character is listed as "Clarence".