Trailer
Plot summary
A man has been beaten to death and mutilated in his home, and detective Joe Leland takes the call. Teddy Leikman is gay and the son of a department store owner with political influence, and the officers at the scene are shaken by what they find. Leland holds the room together with a blunt, practical manner. Few leads turn up, and the strongest is a housemate of the victim who is not there and cannot be found. Talk among the assigned men keeps turning on the dead man's sexuality and private life rather than the crime. At home, Leland's marriage to Karen is breaking down, and he tries to keep his attention on the investigation.
Cast
- Pat Henryas Mercidis
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Detective (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Frank Sinatra wanted his then-wife Mia Farrow to play Norma MacIver in The Detective, but she was kept past the scheduled end of Rosemary's Baby's shoot, so Jacqueline Bisset got the part. Sinatra had divorce papers served on Farrow on that set, and their divorce was final in August 1968.
- Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, a sequel to The Detective, traps detective Joe Leland in a skyscraper seized by German terrorists; it became the 1988 film Die Hard, where Leland was renamed John McClane and the daughter he rescued became his wife.
- Because Die Hard was adapted from the sequel to The Detective, Fox was contractually obliged to offer Frank Sinatra the lead role. Sinatra, then 70, turned it down and the part went to Bruce Willis.
- The Detective was billed as a more adult look at a police detective's work while confronting, for one of the first times in mainstream cinema, taboo subjects such as homosexuality.
