Review: Don Siegel’s Neo-Noir Thriller Madigan on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

Countless police thrillers over the last several decades have doubled as meditations on the ideological perils of black-and-white morality, the authoritarian proclivities of law enforcement, and the proverbial thin blue line, but most have landed with a redundant thud in light of Don Siegel’s genre-defining crime movies of the 1960s and ’70s. The filmmaker’s San Francisco-set Dirty Harry effectively bottled up the law-and-order zeitgeist of the late ’60s, tackling police brutality and rising urban crime rates with a bareknuckle bluntness that would make most contemporary action directors blush.

Dirty Harry might not have come to be had Siegel not taken an earlier stab at telling the story of a loose-cannon cop with Madigan, though to deem the earlier film merely a warmup for a more iconic, more incendiary variation on the same themes is to undersell it. Scripted by Howard Rodman (credited under the pseudonym Henri Simoun) and the formerly blacklisted Abraham Polonsky from a novel by Richard Dougherty, a former police commissioner, Madigan tells the story of an unorthodox police detective, Dan Madigan (Richard Widmark), and his partner, Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino), who together botch a pickup of a homicide suspect and instigate a three-day manhunt that practically throws off the equilibrium of the entire New York Police Department. Where Dirty Harry isolated its magnum-wielding hero against a police force defined by bureaucratic tepidity and incompetence, Madigan gives conventional rules-and-regulations authority its due, incarnating it within the person of Police Commissioner Anthony X. Russell, played by a perfectly cast Henry Fonda.

Fonda had by this point cultivated a formidable roster of conflicted authority figures over a span of nearly four decades in Hollywood. His aged, beleaguered police commissioner is an idealist without a shred of naïveté, a man who has slowly been coming to terms with incidental moral corruption in all facets of his police force for some time but who’s never directly stared it down. That opportunity comes when his longtime friend, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), is caught red-handed in a bribe. Russell sits on the information, keeps up a friendly façade, vents to a married mistress (Susan Clark) in a subplot that understatedly imparts the extent to which Russell’s high ideals have already eroded, and takes out his frustration on Madigan, with whom he has something of an antagonistic history.

The storytelling genius of Madigan is that Widmark and Fonda don’t come to occupy the same space until almost 90 minutes into the film. Russell may give the dangerous order for Madigan to apprehend the killer on the loose within a 72-hour window, but that order trickles down an elaborate chain of command before it reaches its recipient. While Madigan is racing against the clock on the gritty streets of Spanish Harlem and Russell is stationed in his plush office or making appearances at PR events, the tension between the two men is always palpable.

As for Widmark, it’s tempting to take his performance as the rough-around-the-edges detective for granted. One of the defining figures of 20th Century Fox’s noir cycle of the 1940s and ’50s, specializing in cagey hoods and unhinged sadists (he was Oscar-nominated for Kiss of Death), Widmark had spent much the ’60s acting in more respectable roles, with a newly emergent penchant for military brass. Madigan was an opportunity for the actor to summon some of his earlier street-smart edge, and his volatile scenes with Inger Stevens (as Julia, Madigan’s unfulfilled wife) contain some of the finest work of his late career.

Madigan has never perched near the top of the Siegel canon, and in terms of raw craftsmanship or personal expression, it has nothing on more provocative works like Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or even The Beguiled. Perhaps a less intrusive producer than Frank P. Rosenberg—who assumed a near-total license to tinker with the shooting script, and much to Siegel’s chagrin—might have allowed the director more breathing room to execute his vision. But compared to some of Siegel’s lesser work, such as the same year’s relatively campy actioner Coogan Bluff, Madigan is a substantial achievement, an ostensible action picture cloaking a meditative character piece, and its innate quality of moral sordidness has stayed with genre forever since.

Image/Sound

Kino’s new transfer varies in image quality: The brightly lit, foregrounded surfaces are vibrant with definition—the scar-like creases of Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark’s close-ups now register with full clarity—but the picture loses considerable sharpness and solidity as visual information recedes toward the background, with consistently washed-out textures and the black levels frequently unstable. The DTS-HD audio fares better, especially as concerns the propulsive, yet atypically romantic score by jazz arranger Don Costa.

Extras

Excluding a trailer and a few TV spots for other Don Siegel films, the lone extra here is an audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson. Fortunately, it’s a very good one, as these obvious Siegel buffs clearly size up every square inch of the film, while also bringing considerable historical muscle to the discussion. Scene-specific analysis alternates evenly with broader contextual discourse, broaching everything from the television cop dramas of the era to the studio practices of Universal. The result is as comprehensive a survey of the film’s production as is likely to be found anywhere.

Overall

This release of Don Siegel’s morally knotty police procedural isn’t the most well-rounded package, but a new audio commentary offers ample justification of the film’s enduring legacy.