American film and TV have created many mythical detectives. But very few can say they had that role both on camera and in real life, such as Dennis Farina



In the late 1970’s, when the great Michael Mann offered Denis Farina a small role in his fantastic pulp piece Thief (also known as Violent Streets), he had been working at the Chicago Police Department. That was the reason why Mann hired him not just as an actor but also as a consultant for the film. Farina spent eighteen years in the detective business, but playing a detective brought him a lot more money. This is when Farina and Mann’s long collaboration started and it was crowned by his portrayal of Lieutenant Mike Torello in Mann's TV series Crime Story. He appeared in a few episodes of Mann’s cult TV series Miami Vice, and in the excellent Manhunter. To Mann, Farina was an actor who "lived in a cultural niche that was uniquely his own, with unwavering loyalty to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, pocket handkerchiefs, and manicured nails". However, his unusual combination of roughness and elegance, screwing around and threat, was detected by Martin Brest in Midnight Run, in which Farina plays a mobster from Atlantic City. The film includes the cult scene in which Farina is threatening his incompetent assistant to stab him through the heart with a pencil. Even when he tried to step away from the streets of evil, such as in the romantic comedy That Old Feeling by Carl Reiner, in which he starred with Bette Midler, he refused to play on the sentimental card. “That's not for me”, Farina said, skin and bones walking out of a hospital onto a cold Chicago street in one of his last films, Last Rites of Joe May. It was a kind of an omen to his retirement from film; as if he wanted to point out that film was not his game anymore.
(Dragan Rubeša)