Madigan

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Bob C great cop NYC movie. Being Brooklyner i loved the NYC background for gritty well-acted detective movie. Widmark excellent as usual. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 12/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Mostly satisfying and somewhat gritty police procedural from Don Siegel that's a little too stuck in the land of wooden, late 60s cop dramas. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review ashley h Madigan is a decent film. It is about New York detectives Madigan and Bonaro who are given 72 hours by their superior to capture a hoodlum wanted for homicide in Brooklyn. Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda give good performances. The screenplay is a little slow in places. Don Siegel did an alright job directing this movie. I liked this motion picture because of the drama and mystery. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Directed by Don Siegel who had a foot firmly planted in classic Hollywood and who was also a trailblazer in modernizing American action films, "Madigan" serves the perfect bridge between the two. Co-written by Abraham Polonsky, who'd previously been on the Hollywood Blacklist for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the film follows two different NYPD police officers. One is Madigan, a tough no-nonsense detective played by Richard Widmark trying to catch a killer, and the other is the straight-arrow police commissioner, Henry Fonda, who's balancing justice, politics, and an extra-marital affair. The film was based on a book titled "The Commissioner" and Fonda's character was the original focus of the story, but the producers instead changed the focus to Widmark's Madigan character, so the film unfortunately ends up a an odd combination of two different stories. Both Fonda and Widmark's stories involve them having to balance their work-life and home-life, but neither of those story elements seemed all that interesting. The most interesting part of the story concerned Widmark and his partner, Harry Guardino, on the trail of criminal Steve Ihnat. Watching Widmark and Guardino push the boundaries of acceptable law enforcement in their investigation makes this film an interesting bridge to director Don Siegel's controversial and highly influential vigilante cop film "Dirty Harry" he'd make a few years later. Siegel also makes great use of NYC locations that give ether film added grit and realism, much like we'd later see in William Friedkin's "The French Connection" and Siegel's use of San Francisco in "Dirty Harry." Siegel also skillfully demonstrates his own directional action sequences chops with a memorable showdown in the film's finale, which features with three characters in tight quarters, all with John Woo-style double-fisted pistols in each hand. Overall, "Madigan" features an old style police detective story (with a nice plot nod to Kurosawa's "Stray Dog") that abandons the stylistic German Expressionist roots of American film noir and instead takes the genre into new more realistic and gritty of territory, even if those stronger elements get somewhat undone by dull and unoriginal subplots involving the marital lives of Madigan and the commissioner. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Based on a book centering on a week in a police commissioner's compartmentalized life, this film focuses more on the results oriented detective whom the commissioner wishes was in some other city's payroll. All this in spite of Fonda being signed as the leading role, which after shooting & editing became Widmark. Directors prerogative. Because of the grittiness & violence, this could almost be considered a white-man's Shaft. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member Don Siegel's proficient actioner launches a whole cycle of urban movies about cops (the good and the bad), including Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Madigan

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