Sidney Lumet started his career in live television during the 1950s, made his feature debut in 1957 with Twelve Angry Men, and has worked at a furious pace ever since, turning out landmark pictures like Network and Long Day's Journey Into Night along the way. His movies are set in many different places, but like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, he's a New York director at heart, often coupling New York settings with crime-based stories. The best-known examples are Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon from the 1970s, plus the 2001-2002 television series 100 Centre Street, which he created and sometimes directed.

And then there's Prince of the City, his police drama of 1981. Its plot harkens back to Serpico territory, taking another look at the idea that an honest cop is an awful threat to business as usual in the law-enforcement system. The subject is compelling, but the casting is less so. Whatever you think of Treat Williams, who plays the ubiquitous main character, you have to admit he's no Al Pacino.

The hero of the story is Daniel Ciello, a New York City narcotics cop who has all the necessary skills and knows all the streetwise tricks, including the use of free drugs to buy the loyalty of useful informers. Ciello has fed large quantities of dope to the junkies he relies on for tips, and so have the other narcs he works with every day. They've also learned how to siphon off some of the drug-bust cash that comes their way-easy to do, since their special narcotics detail gets to work on its own schedule and according to its own rules. The way Ciello sees it, he's neither a saint nor a villain, just an average cop doing a dirty, difficult job the best he can.

Since everything he's doing is common practice in his unit, Ciello is surprised when he gets a visit from an internal-affairs officer tracking down police corruption. His first reaction is to brush the whole thing off, remembering the code of silence that street cops honor among themselves. But his conscience has been bothering him lately. If he prowls the city looking for drugs to pay informants and cash to cushion his own hard life, what separates him from the bad guys he's supposed to be against? So he decides to cooperate, on the condition that he won't accuse or implicate any of his partners. "You sleep with your wife," he says, "but you live with your partners."

Before long Ciello is wearing a wire and collecting huge amounts of tape-recorded evidence for use in future prosecutions. He's also discovering how hard it is to draw solid lines between good cops and bad ones, friends and enemies, actual partners and casual companions. And then another problem starts to shadow him. When he agreed to participate in the investigation, he had to reveal any crookedness he'd been personally involved in, and the department promised to shield him against punishment for these crimes. But he didn't tell the whole truth, and if his hidden misdeeds come to light, the revelation will ruin the cases he's been helping with, and shipwreck his own future too.

The screenplay of Prince of the City, written by Lumet and Jay Presson Allen, is based on a 1978 book by Robert Daley about Robert Leuci, a real New York detective who assisted a corruption probe in 1971 and then left police work to become a crime novelist and ethicist. The filmmakers wanted Pacino to play him, but Pacino said no, apparently because the character was too much like Frank Serpico, the crusading cop he'd portrayed in 1973. In the end Williams snagged the role, and that's one of the picture's problems. Ciello appears in nearly every scene-in nearly every shot, for that matter-and Williams isn't a strong enough actor to handle such constant exposure in such an emotional story. In the action scenes he's a little too self-assured, and in the psychological scenes his lack of subtlety makes Ciello seem annoyingly overwrought. At two hours and forty-seven minutes, the film's overlong running time aggravates this by making Williams's performance into something of an endurance contest-although viewers of the DVD edition can count their blessings, since it presents the theatrical cut, not the TV version that ran a whopping four hours.

Back on the plus side, Williams's disappointing work is partly offset by the kind of praiseworthy supporting cast that Lumet has a particular talent for assembling. It includes Bob Balaban and Paul Roebling as self-satisfied officials, Lindsay Crouse as Ciello's wife, Jerry Orbach as a corrupt colleague, Lane Smith as a cop guarding Ciello's family, and Cynthia Nixon in the small part of an addict's girlfriend. The impressive roster of secondary actors is one of several areas where Prince of the City prefigures TV's great series The Wire, which also paints an ambivalent portrait of urban cops who work in dismal surroundings and rely heavily on electronic eavesdropping; even Lumet's use of printed on-screen words anticipates the later drama, which apparently drew much inspiration from him.

The picture's most impressive element is Andrzej Bartkowiak's moody cinematography, especially the rich blue tones that dominate many scenes and come across beautifully in the DVD transfer. In other respects the DVD from Warner Bros. is less than ideal. The movie is spread over two discs, even though the only extras are a theatrical trailer and a half-hour documentary about the film's background with comments by director Lumet, co-screenwriter Allen, star Williams, original author Daley, and former detective Leuci, whose exploits set the whole project off. Parts of the short are as interesting as the feature, and a lot more concise as well.

For more information about Prince of the City, visit Warner Video. To order Prince of the City, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Sterritt