Sidney Lumet (1973)

The film was made very shortly after the real-life events that it describes.  Frank Serpico, a Brooklyn-born New York Police Department officer who worked undercover to expose police corruption, was shot and seriously injured during a drugs raid in early 1971, testified before the Knapp Commission late the same year, received the NYPD ‘Medal of Honor’ in May 1972 and retired the next month.   Peter Maas’s book about Serpico, on which Waldo Salt’s screenplay is based, was published the following year and Sidney Lumet’s movie opened in December 1973.  Serpico, with Al Pacino in the title role, isn’t as involving or as entertaining as you’d expect (or as I remembered, from 1974).  The speed at which it was put together – the movie was shot in ten weeks – may be part of the problem.  Salt’s script is sketchy and Sidney Lumet relies principally on the length of Serpico’s hair and beard, and the size of his Old English Sheepdog, to convey the passage of time.  Lumet stages some of the crime action very well:  an arrest that Serpico makes after a gang rape; the sequence in which he’s shot.  Elsewhere, though, the direction seems hurried and untidy.

On his first day as an NYPD patrolman, Serpico goes to the canteen and insists on a sandwich different from the one that the man behind the counter recommends.  This is meant to be an immediate clue to the hero’s cussed refusal to accept the status quo, and it’s a warning of how obviously the hero’s attitude will be established.  An early scene involving his family briefly promises to use Serpico’s life outside work as a means of dramatising his character but the family are then forgotten until the parents’ reappearance, several years later, as their son lies critically ill from his bullet wounds.  Lumet and Salt seem determined to minimise the possibilities of making Serpico less isolated and single-minded.  He has two girlfriends in the course of the film.   The first one is there simply to demonstrate that she and her social world – peopled by would-be writers and actors who earn a living as insurance clerks etc – are too airy-fairy for Serpico’s liking.  The writing of a party scene involving this crowd is crude and the scene doesn’t fit into the overall scheme of the movie but it’s almost welcome because of that, and because Serpico can behave somewhat differently in it.  The second girlfriend, Laurie, is more significant.   A few of the scenes between her and Frank, especially the less tortured ones, are good but the film-makers, like Serpico himself, seem to regard this love interest as fundamentally distracting to their mission.  Barbara Eda Young, the actress who plays Laurie, occasionally suggests a resistance to this conception of her role as well as to Frank’s order of priorities.   Al Pacino’s surprise when Laurie repeats that her relationship with Serpico is over is a strong moment and he gets the hero’s real, though blinkered, intelligence very well.   Throughout the movie, though, Pacino is more effective throwing a line away than emoting it.  He often gets shouty.  And though Serpico’s eccentric appearance and clothing are no doubt based on how he really looked, they still suggest an actor dressing up.

This illustrates a larger problem with Serpico.  It’s not only based on a true story; it’s based on one so well known at the time that Lumet feels no need to remind the audience of that in the opening credits.  Yet the movie feels phony – it’s an example of relying on the fact that something really happened as an excuse for not taking the trouble to make it convincing on screen.  It’s understandable if Frank Serpico saw the whole NYPD as a malign conspiracy but Sidney Lumet makes the other policemen, in spite of a cast that includes Jack Kehoe and F Murray Abraham, monotonously nasty and transparently corrupt.   The rare exceptions, like the character played by Tony Roberts, seem altogether out of place, although the more nuanced John Randolph is convincing as one of the senior cops.   Pacino’s principal co-star is a score by Mikis Theodorakis which is interruptive and confusingly Greek-sounding.  (Serpico is from Italian-American stock.)  The music doesn’t occur for long stretches then, when it returns, it dominates to ridiculous effect.  It drowns out Serpico’s voice at the Commission hearings.  Whenever he’s sharing a scene with Theodorakis, Al Pacino really does need to shout.

30 April 2013