The end of an era. Cops in suits with narrow ties and fedoras, worn inside and out, day and night. Lincoln sedans with rear suicide doors. Women in bright colours, hats, and fully made up stay at home wives. The bad guys and near criminals in mauves and plush velour at the edge of the beatnik fringe. Dial telephones, typewriters, carbon paper, no computers, cops using phone booths and carrying dimes, cigarettes and booze everywhere, adultery, a near drunken sexual assault, all 60's stuff at the end of an era. Widmark is too old to have both a hot wife and an ongoing pleutonic relationship with a nightclub singer. He is also a nice guy one minute and physically threatening an old lady the next or kicking down a door without a warrant. He can't carry off the bad cop and rule breaker role. There is a subplot with police corruption and the straight laced commissioner learns too bend a little with advice from his married girlfriend. There is a second subplot with a potential racial police incident with a black suspect. The finale is pre-SWAT teams with the two detectives breaking through a door armed with two handguns each in a shootout reminiscent of a B western. Forget the plot, with its many flaws, and focus on the New York and the sixties look and feel

A great movie with many different points, but the main thing is that this movie was done in 1968. Although I was being born then, I understand this was the year that the U.S. changed quite a lot. Madigan is an aging cop who is clearly a product of the "old days". Detectives still wore suits and ties and were not "politically correct". Madigan is struggling in a new World of hippies, parties, wives and mistresses who have their own needs, and race relations. None of this is very blatant in the movie. It is always there, though, part of the side story. The main thing is that Madigan (Richard Widmark) and his partner (Harry Guardino) are humiliated on a routing arrest when the suspect grabs his gun and escapes. It is apparent that the police department is under more and more scrutiny during the Vietnam War Era. The commissioner (Henry Fonda) is a calm and fair man who has to deal with the fallout of his botched arrest. Madigan has to restore his lost honor and pride. It becomes clear that his whole life revolves around his work, and his wife is extremely depressed by the low pay and long hours. It becomes Madigan's obsession to capture the suspect that he was humiliated by. In the end, he pays with his life to do that. This movie really touched me in very subtle ways. Don Stroud plays a long haired street hustler (not sure what he was exactly - possibly a drug dealer),and he brilliantly represents someone who struggles between being a hippy and being a man of the past - tough guy. Harry Bellaver from The Naked City has a minor role as a man who once may have been something, but now is just a lonely old alcoholic. Madigan is so frustrated and impatient that when the suspect is cornered, he refuses to wear a vest. He pays with his life for this. It is a very symbolic action, because he feels that he has lost his honor and has to restore it at all costs. His wife scolding the commissioner at the end shows that there is no easy solution and answer in the tough World of being a cop and being the commissioner (who has to soft pedal the whole thing).

A muddled film that reminds me of Frank Sinatra vehicle "The Detective" released the same year. Both movies augment tough, realistic, location-shot police procedural material with stagy drama from their cops' personal lives, and both attempt to deal with adult sexual issues in a frank & forthright manner. And they both largely miss the mark: the personal drama doesn't integrate well with the action-oriented police-work, and the sexual frankness is awkward and badly dated. That said, this movie does have its pleasures.Widmark is very good, if a bit too old for the part. He brings an element of volatility to his character, and makes Madigan's seeming contradictions (nasty one minute, compassionate the next) wholly credible.The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. Watch for the wild, hammy, but engaging bit parts played by Michael Dunn as a shady little person informer, Don Stroud as a petulant, sleazy pimp, and Steve Ihnat as the crazed killer. The scenes with these three characters are some of the sharpest in the film, little set pieces that really bring the proceedings to life.Fonda's role is a tougher assignment. His character is an intimidating, implacable moral absolutist, a man of few words who processes events internally. In the course of the film he runs into a variety of moral dilemmas, and has to make decisions about them. So how would an actor communicate what's roiling within this character? Beats me, because Fonda didn't do it. He walks through every scene stone-faced, and his decisions seem utterly random. He played this so understated that no statement is made at all.And the less said about the personal drama love interest scenes the better. Though Inger Stevens and Susan Clark do their best with their thin roles, this stuff kills the pacing of the main story threads. Stevens role as Madigan's wife is there largely to give the story's ending some emotional kick, but it just ain't happening.The climactic shootout scene at the end is brutal and utterly convincing. Siegel could do compelling action scenes with the best of them. This little bit of the movie is truly great.So yeah, it's a flawed film, but die-hard fans of crime & police drama, Siegel, and/or Widmark should check this out anyway.

A good, solid cop story made believable by the solid performances of Widmark and Fonda. Steve Ihnat, an unknown, steals the show as he creates the character Barney Benesch. Benesch is the most cold blooded, asocial, homicidal animal you ever saw. Vicious, insane, suicidal and homicidal. He is never without a .45 in each hand even while carrying a sack of groceries. Good scene: Widmark and his partner spot a guy in a booth in a bar that they think might be Benesch. When he expresses his resentment over being harassed, Widmark tried to brush him off by saying, "I'm sorry. You looked like some guy from Cleveland." The guy jumps out of the booth and attacks them, shouting, "Nobody tells me I look like I'm from Cleveland." The weak point in the movie comes when Widmark and his partner corner Benesch in a small apartment and he is behind a refrigerator with a pistol in each hand daring them to "come and get him." Just before they go in a uniformed cop offers them bullet proof vests, which they refuse. NO cop would do that. And if he did he would be immediately removed from duty for a psych exam. So they go in, guns blazing, while Benesch comes out, guns blazing. Stupid end to what could have been a much better movie. But still worth watching because of a superb cast.