O Primeiro Pecado Mortal

"The First Deadly Sin" will be remembered as the last starring role for Frank Sinatra. It's a good performance in a decent (but should have been better) film.

Frank plays a New York homicide detective investigating a series of murders. This main story is a good one. It is involving and creepy. David Dukes turns in a terrific performance as the killer. The problem comes in the sub-plot with Faye Dunaway as Frank's dying wife. Every 10 or 15 minutes the film comes to a screeching halt so Frank can visit Faye in the hospital. Faye must have been desperate to work with Frank since she literally spends the entire film in a hospital bed. It's a needless distraction to the main plot.

Still the film is worth watching. Frank is at his gritty best as his whole world falls apart in front of his eyes. The film also does one other good thing. It erased the possibility that the awful "Dirty Dingus Magee" would be his last starring role.

Above-average police procedural based on the excellent novel by Lawrence Sanders. The Chairman of the Board delivers a powerful performance as Sgt. Detective Edward X. Delany, and David Dukes's Daniel Blank is suitably psychotic (if a bit tamer than in the novel). Plays somewhat fast and loose with the adaption, but still does the book justice. Like the book, this is somewhat slow paced and character-driven, but Sinatra does such a good job at making Delany human and making the audience emote for him that the shortcomings seem minimal. If you are a fan of Sanders, police procedurals, or Frank Sinatra, then this film is certainly worth checking out.

While I love gritty NYC detective films, This one is rather disappointing. The atmosphere is destroyed in the first few minutes intercutting Sinatra's wife kidney operation with the murder of a New York accountant. Unnecessary and repulsive., it takes you out of the suspense. The movie is a shell of the novel on which it was based in which we really get into the mind of the killer and his motives, and how he is swayed into murder for fun by a psychotic girlfriend. This is completely left out of the film, as well as the NYC politics within the police department. We really don't know anything about the killer in the film, and his identification as the killer is ridiculously fast, as well as the conclusion. The film reminds me a lot of Cruising, also released in 1980, which also had a rushed look to it, and felt incomplete. But that is understandable in Cruising because of the gay community protest of the film during location shooting. The First Deadly Sin had no such problems, unless Frank Sinatra who was notorious for being impatient during shoots, refused to elaborate on the location shooting. However, even a mediocre film from the 80's is a hundred times better than the Marvel garbage on the screen today. Their are some great supporting performances by Sinatra's amateur helpers and a sleazy doorman. Overall worthwhile seeing, but not anywhere as good as it should have been

I saw someone else's user comments on this film and I can't believe that there were going to be series of films based on Frank Sinatra's character mainly because of the ending this film had. If you're thinking that gives the ending away, don't look for an obvious conclusion.

To his credit, I guess Frank Sinatra did not want to end his film career with Dirty Dingus Magee. He wanted to end his film with the serious part, unfortunately The First Deadly Sin messes up the telling of a potentially good tale.

Frank Sinatra is days away from his retirement as a Detective Sergeant and a strange murder has been assigned to him. A man apparently selected at random is killed with an unidentified weapon that is just driven into the top of his skull. A little good detective work and he finds their just might be a pattern of killings.

It's all in identifying the weapon and it's an unusual one at that which I won't reveal. A professor in medieval history played by Martin Gabel helps with the hunt and later on he's joined by the widow of Sinatra's victim, Brenda Vaccaro to help with the hunt.

They're helping because Sinatra's new captain is one total jerk played by Anthony Zerbe. Maybe I'm missing something in Zerbe's performance, but I would think that an ambitious guy like Zerbe plays would instead of pooh-poohing Sinatra's ideas would think that this guy if he is on to something with this serial killer business. And if he's right Zerbe will get all kinds of accolades for figuring this out in his precinct and even more if the doer is apprehended. It's an absolutely impossible role and poor Anthony Zerbe can't do much with it.

All this while Frank's wife Faye Dunaway falls ill to a misdiagnosed kidney malady. She spends all her time in the hospital and Sinatra visits her at breaks in this case.

Frank delivers a very good performance in a role similar to the one he had in The Detective. He's supported by the rest of the cast very well, except with Anthony Zerbe's impossible role. Besides who I've mentioned look for a really nice turn by Joe Spinell as the mendacious doorman where suspect David Dukes lives. His role is similarly undefined, we really never learn why he's doing these crimes.

I have already seen "Seven", "The bone collector" and "Copycat", so naturally this doesn't seem to surprise me or anything like that, but I had a great time watching Frank Sinatra in his last major movie appearance and was equally shocked to see Faye Dunaway so woefully wasted on a hospital bed and not enough lines for an amateur let alone ... the screenplay is just fine and the supporting characters, esp. that old curator, hit the right notes. Sinatra's strong presence virtually lifts it out of the ordinary.