General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Madigan

Madigan is a 1968 American crime drama directed by Don Siegel, starring Richard Widmark as a New York police detective and Henry Fonda as the city's police commissioner, adapted from Richard Dougherty's novel The Commissioner.¹ The film follows two parallel stories over one weekend: detectives Daniel Madigan and Rocco Bonaro, who lose their firearms to a fugitive killer and are given 72 hours to recapture him, and Commissioner Anthony X. Russell, who juggles corruption allegations, an affair, and his department's politics.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	March 29, 1968 (limited), Universal Pictures; 101 minutes³
Source	Novel The Commissioner by Richard Dougherty; screenplay by Howard Rodman (credited as Henri Simoun) and Abraham Polonsky¹
Lead cast	Richard Widmark (Det. Daniel Madigan), Henry Fonda (Commissioner Anthony X. Russell), Inger Stevens (Julia Madigan), Harry Guardino (Det. Rocco Bonaro), James Whitmore (Chief Inspector Charles Kane)¹
Premise	Madigan and Bonaro lose their pistols to suspected murderer Barney Benesch (Steve Ihnat) and have 72 hours to get them back²
Reception	75% Tomatometer from 12 critics; 47% Popcornmeter from 1,000+ audience ratings; 6.5/10 on IMDb²^•⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Russell Metty, editing Milton Shifman, music Don Costa, producer Frank P. Rosenberg¹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film opens in a Spanish Harlem tenement, where Madigan and Bonaro surprise the fugitive Barney Benesch in bed with a girlfriend. Benesch turns the tables, seizes their guns, and escapes, leaving the two detectives with a deadline from Commissioner Russell: recover the pistols and bring Benesch in within 72 hours.⁵^•²

While the two detectives work the case, the film follows Russell through a compartmentalized weekend. He confronts evidence of corruption surrounding his boyhood friend, Chief Inspector Charles Kane, who has been double-dealing with a crime syndicate to protect his erring son; he faces accusations of police brutality from a minister; and he manages an extramarital affair.⁵^•² Both leads balance work and home life, and critics have generally found these domestic subplots the weaker half of the film.²

The story ends with Madigan getting his man but being killed in the process, a fate the film shares with the aging, studio-era cop heroes of The Detective (1968) and Across 110th Street (1972).⁶

Production

The screenplay went through several titles before release: a third draft called The Commissioner (December 21, 1966), a version titled Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the final screenplay titled Madigan, all dated February 27, 1967 in the Don Siegel collection at Boston University.⁷ Its writers had both been blacklisted in the 1950s: Howard Rodman, credited under the pseudonym Henri Simoun, and Abraham Polonsky, who had refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.¹^•²

A troubled shoot. Serious clashes between Siegel and producer Frank Rosenberg marked the production. Rosenberg considered himself the boss of the project and rewrote scenes, which the cast then had to dub back in as written; Fonda recalled that Rosenberg had the actor record a single missing word, "the", and looped it into the final cut after Siegel refused a reshoot.¹ The dispute peaked over the location for the action finale. Most of the picture was shot on location in New York, but after Widmark and Guardino's car was attacked by a gang in Harlem and the prop man was mugged, the company moved to Los Angeles. Siegel found his own location that looked convincingly like New York and appealed over Rosenberg's head to Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, who sided with the director.¹

Widmark's assessment of Siegel was emphatic: he called him one of the three best directors he ever worked with, alongside John Ford and Elia Kazan, describing him as "efficient, organized, quiet, and in total command".¹

Place in Siegel's career and the cop-film genre

A transitional film. Time Out describes Madigan as marking a crossroads in Siegel's career: the strongarm methods of the two detectives recall the professional gunmen of Siegel's earlier The Killers, while the film looks forward to Coogan's Bluff (1968) and Dirty Harry (1971) as the first to exploit the ambivalent enforcer/protector role of the police in society.⁸ Siegel followed it with Coogan's Bluff only months later, the first of five films with Clint Eastwood.⁹

The film belongs to a cluster of 1968 police pictures, alongside Gordon Douglas' The Detective and Peter Yates' Bullitt, that continued the liberal tradition of the genre with a greater degree of physical violence, taking advantage of new permissiveness in language and in the depiction of the urban milieu. Fonda's commissioner, like Sinatra's and McQueen's counterparts, is a sensible man doing a difficult job with a minimum of force amid political interference and public indifference.¹⁰ Reviewers have also noted the film's use of New York locations for grit and realism, in the same vein as William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971), and a plot structure with a nod to Kurosawa's Stray Dog, in which a cop's stolen weapon drives the hunt.²

Reception

Madigan was a big hit and one of Siegel's own favorites, and its reviews were among the best of any film he had directed; critics praised its urban grittiness and straightforward style.¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 75% Tomatometer from 12 reviews, with an average of rated reviews of 6.70/10, against a 47% Popcornmeter audience score from more than 1,000 ratings.² Contemporary and later critics have been divided on the film's two-story structure: TIME called it "a good movie about some bad days at New York City's police department", while Dennis Schwartz judged it "a pleasing but disjointed film noir" whose complicated storylines run into each other without doing any of them complete justice.⁵^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1960s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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