The First Deadly Sin

All this on-going chat about mug-shots brought a blast from the past; Francis Albert Sinatra did it his way when he posed for a pretty cool police identification pic way back in 1938, when accused of the crime of ‘seduction’. By 1980, Sinatra was well beyond his prime as a seducer, having turned down the role of Dirty Harry and soon to turn down the role of John McClane in Die Hard, but still had claim to a huge fan-base for his music and live shows; he’d been off the big screen for almost a decade, so The First Deadly Sin was a much ballyhooed vehicle to return him to being a marquee name in cinema.

Alas, this adaptation of the chunky Lawrence Sanders novel didn’t quite do the job, with a few elements of the chairman of the board’s masterplan falling apart; the mooted director, Roman Polanski ended up fleeing the country permanently on a rape charge, leaving Brian G Hutton (Where Eagles Dare) to take up the reins on this bitter cop-show. Sinatra plays Edward Delaney, a NYC detective closing in on retirement but with one last, dangerous case to solve, a serial killer who uses an unconventional item as a weapon; an ice-axe, designed for mountaineering use. While Delaney’s wife lies in hospital, the cop hits the snowy Manhattan streets, searching for a personal redemption that might somehow season his wife for her passage…

The First Deadly Sin has a striking, wintry atmosphere, with Catholic iconography set against graphic surgery scenes, gruesome autopsies, an early appearance by Bruce Willis, and an aging Sinatra well cast as a man out of time. It’s something of a shock seeing old blue eyes dealing with such modern phenomena as ‘computer analysis’, ‘erections’, smoking joints and the responsibility of being the last male star to wear a hat into the 1980’s; High Society this is not. There’s always a backlog of scumbags to put away in this kind of scenario, and Delaney’s heart isn’t in it; his Captain admonishes his procrastination although his motivational advice probably doesn’t reflect current NYD law enforcement language, policy or mission statements; ‘All I care about is cleaning up the garbage in this dump. I got enough whores, pimps, queers and freaks roamin’ around out there to start my own Macy’s parade. So if you got Jack the Ripper goin’ down on Lizzie Borden in the middle of Times Square, I don’t wanna’ know about it!…’

Although some of such scuzzy detail feels authentic to a fault, it seems bizarre that for all his experience, Delaney doesn’t even have professional access to any kind of weapons expert, and has to relay on a museum-working contact to identify the weapon used; rather more damning as to the attitudes of the time is the casual lawman’s description of a witness as having ‘a nice ass and a great set of jugs’. And the element of class conflict is also well drawn ‘Uptown doctors, uptown diseases’ is a pointed line with dissects Delaney’s medical problems as being very much his own private war; he’s got rich people’s problems. For all its flaws, The First Deadly Sin contains Sinatra’s last substantial performance, and it’s substantially better than his Tony Rome/Lady in Cement turn; while not the grand send-off Sinatra was looking for, it’s an ernest, worthwhile movie for fans of the star.