Sayonara Sinatra

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM that's getting another showing is The First Deadly Sin. That next airing is early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, or at the end of tonight's prime time lineup if you want to look at it that way.

The movie starts off with some interesting intercutting. On the one hand, we have a woman on the operating table getting surgery for some sort of kidney condition. On the other, it's the streets of New York City at night, and one man comes up with what looks like some sort of hammer, and bashes another man to death with it! The two turn out to be indirectly related, in that the woman on the operating table is Barbara Delaney (Faye Dunaway), the wife of New York police detective Edward Delaney (Frank Sinatra).

Edward has a lot on his mind, because the surgery goes wrong, forcing the surgeon, Dr. Berardi, to remove one of Barbara's kidneys. Meanwhile, in the murder case, the coroner, Dr. Ferguson (James Whitmer), reveals to Edward that the wound from the weapon is circular, which is interesting in that it means the murder must have been committed with a weapon that's not all that common. It also turns out that there's a series of unsolved murders that seem to have involved similar wounds.

So Edward calls upon someone who doesn't work for the police, but is an expert in obscure weapons, Christopher Langley (Martin Gabel) at the Metropolitan Museum. He doesn't know of any weapons in his ambit that might have caused the death, but is intrigued by the case and decides to help investigate by going to hardware stores. They can't really help him, beyond suggesting that perhaps it might be the sort of ice axe that mountain climbers use. That's actually good information, since not many people use such an implement. And when Langley goes to the sporting goods store to investigate, he gets a list of people who have bought the sort of ice axe that was used in the murder.

So Edward starts doing some investigating of the sort that the police department wouldn't really approve of and would probably result in all the evidence gathered being thrown out of court. The first guy obviously couldn't have done it, since he was paralyzed in a mountain climbing accident. The second man, however, Daniel Blank (David Dukes), seems like a much more likely suspect. Then again, the way the movie is edited, it's already led us to believe that this is the killer. Meanwhile, another attempted killing goes wrong, and there's still the situation with Edward's wife, which is many ways is really extraneous to the plot.

The murder mystery part of The First Deadly Sin is reasonably well done, and the sort of movie where I can see why Frank Sinatra would want to do it. But there's that whole pointless subplot involving the Faye Dunaway character, who really has a thankless acting task here. So the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a mishmash that doesn't always work. Frank Sinatra was 64 at the time he made this, and it was pretty much his last real movie apart from some cameos. It's not a bad way to go out, although it could have been better.