Review of The First Deadly Sin

Frank Sinatra put on a pretty decent performance here (in what's billed as his last starring performance, although he was in "Cannonball Run II" a few years later) as Edward X. Delaney - a New York City police detective weeks away from retirement, who gets caught up in a murder investigation that his commanding officer (for reasons I never clearly understood) would prefer him to leave alone. Sinatra's performance, though, was really the only thing that made this movie worth watching. The story of the search for the psychopathic killer wasn't all that interesting, and while the subplot revolving around the illness of Delaney's hospital-bound wife (a rather simple role played by Faye Dunaway) took up a fair amount of screen time, it also added nothing to spark the movie, except perhaps to ground Delaney as a loving husband. Delaney does come across as a sympathetic character for the most part, although he's a cop willing to go to any lengths (legal or otherwise) to get this killer. Aside from that there was one very effective scene in which the curator Langley (Martin Gabel) goes to a hardware store trying to figure out what the murder weapon was which added some welcome comedy relief to this otherwise rather poorly structured and poorly paced movie, which I would frankly have to say was one of the least exciting and least interesting murder mysteries I've ever seen.