Film-making guts and glory are on display from director Sidney Lumet, star Al Pacino and many others in this compelling New York crime drama from 1973. It is based on the true story of whistleblowing police officer Frank Serpico who, outraged by the top-to-bottom corruption in the NYPD, finally went to the New York Times with his evidence. In revenge, dirty cops knowingly led Serpico into a dangerous standoff with armed criminals in an apartment building and left him undefended to be shot in the face. Screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler adapted the bestseller from journalist Peter Maas’s book about the police officer’s remarkable life, on which Serpico collaborated almost immediately on being invalided out of the department.
Serpico is a classic movie of 1970s New York: it has Tony Roberts, F Murray Abraham and M Emmet Walsh in minor roles; sweat and grit and fear pulse off it like waves; and there are dynamic streetscape scenes. For me the most extraordinary of these comes when an entirely corrupt officer, driving in a squad car with Serpico in the passenger seat, sees a young black man on the street who he needs to shakedown, and recklessly reverses at speed through three city blocks to the astonishment of bystanders to track him down and beat him up. The casual and ubiquitous racism of the police is an obvious factor here.
Pacino gives one of the most complex, densely achieved performances of his career, his whole body apparently compressed with tension and rage; his vocal cords also, giving him that slightly nasal, quivering, adenoidal speech pattern that he had as a younger man, not so different from the young Dustin Hoffman. This is a young cop on his first day on the job who is instantly alert to, and offended by, a tiny hint of corruption, which he correctly senses is symptomatic of something larger. Cops accept poor cuts of meat in the roast beef sandwiches that a local deli owner gives them for free in exchange for ignoring his parking violations.
Pacino bestrides the movie’s central, queasy irony: the idea of going undercover. Serpico is someone with hippy-ish ideas and a need for self-improvement, attending night school classes on Don Quixote, an interesting role model. He gets a transfer out of the uniformed division and goes undercover with cheesecloth shirt, bucket hat and funky moustache, all of which irritate the senior officers who are more than ready to make homophobic sneers based on the belief that he must be gay. The presence of Roberts in this film incidentally brings in memories of Woody Allen, in whose films Roberts often appeared. And there is a truly surreal moment when Serpico returns to the station house dressed undercover as a Hassidic Jew, a weirdly Woody Allen-esque moment.
But Serpico is wearied by having to explain to cool young people at the parties he goes to with his ballet-student girlfriend that he’s a cop. And soon the awful truth is that he’s not just undercover in the streets, he’s undercover at the station house, compiling evidence and complaining that so much administrative energy goes into the business of collecting bribes which, if it were channelled into law enforcement, would solve New York’s crime problems overnight.
This is a movie about disguise, denial, alienation and the terrible toll taken on the people who make a stand that their fearful or resentful contemporaries see as odd, eccentric or foolhardy – but will later sheepishly admit were entirely right. There are so many great set pieces in the film: my favourite is when the senior police officers earnestly hand out weed to grinning young officers to educate them about what “marijuana cigarettes” smell and taste like – and Serpico and his buddy Bob Blair (Roberts) get so high together that they get the courage to start their campaign against police payoffs. A classic.
• Serpico is released on 18 August in UK cinemas and is screening now in select Australian cinemas.
