"It's incredible but I feel like a criminal because I don't take money." So says frustrated New York policeman Frank Serpico in the fact based drama cop drama Serpico (1973). As portrayed by Al Pacino, Serpico is the resident nonconformist in the working class New York Police Department, a college-educated street cop with counter-culture tendencies, an increasingly shaggy appearance (the clean-shaven rookie grows out his hair and his beard as the film progresses) and a penchant for jokes that his blue collar coworkers never get. His refusal to take the bribes that other cops accept as part of the job makes him a pariah on the force and even the Internal Affairs division treats him as trouble, but he's more reluctant whistleblower than shining knight in blue. It's not moral superiority that drives him to break the "blue wall," simply his disgust with the culture of corruption in a job that he believes in. As the department closes ranks to protect its own from outside investigators and the wheels of justice get jammed out of fear of scandal, he becomes a walking target.

The real-life Frank Serpico made headlines as the scandals broke and, as an independent commission delved into the scope of the corruption, he was almost killed on the job under suspicious circumstances. Peter Maas put his story into a non-fiction bestseller, which Martin Bregman optioned as his first feature as a producer. Previous films about police corruption tended to frame the issue in terms of bad apples in an otherwise healthy barrel. This was very different, yet Bregman was more interested in the man and his experience than a story of corruption and investigation, and the episodic script follows Serpico as he is bounced from one precinct to another and becomes more alienated, frustrated and desperate. He found a collaborator on the same wavelength in Sidney Lumet, a TV-trained director with a reputation for strong performances, literary adaptations and, in films like The Pawnbroker (1964), creating a sense of street realism. The New York-born Lumet shot most of Serpico on the streets and in standing buildings rather than sets wherever possible, and he brought a distinctive sense of place with his choice of locations and his documentary-style approach to shooting. While that became a hallmark of seventies police dramas and crime thrillers to follow, it was still quite new at the time. Along with The French Connection (1971), Serpico was one of the films that brought this new realism to the screen portrait of American cops with its realistic portraits of procedure and systemic failure and flawed, human characters behind the badges.

Al Pacino's star was on the rise when he was cast as Frank Serpico - he had just completed his first major role in The Godfather (1972) - but where he was part of a powerful ensemble in France Ford Coppola's gangster epic, Pacino was in every scene of Serpico. As the script was driven more by character than plot, it fell to Pacino's performance to carry the film. To prepare for the role, he spent days with the real Frank Serpico trying to get to the heart of the man and the struggle of his ordeal. According to Lumet, Pacino so subsumed himself in the role while shooting that he often carried the character off screen.

Serpico was shot fast and loose, as much out of preference as of necessity. Lumet liked to shoot quickly and he believed that the tempo of production helped drive the tempo of the film. But the project was also rushing to meet a release date: shooting began in July 1973 for a Christmas release, "an insanely short time," in the words of Lumet. Scenes were edited as they were shot so that Lumet had a rough cut by the time shooting ended in August and time to fine tune the rhythms of the episodic narrative.

The Watergate scandal was breaking as Serpico was released at the end of 1973 and the story of systemic corruption and cover-ups and Pacino's loose, energized performance as an idealistic policeman who essentially sacrifices his career and his girlfriend and almost loses his life to do the right thing struck a chord with audiences. The film was a hit. Pacino earned his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (he lost to Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger) and won a Golden Globe for his performance. The film's screenplay, by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, was also Oscar® nominated, and though Lumet was ignored by the Academy, he was nominated for Best Director by the Director's Guild of America. The film also established Lumet as a director of intelligent, gritty, modern crime dramas. Two years later, Lumet reunited with Pacino for the acclaimed Dog Day Afternoon (1973), a film with the same dynamic sense of character and location and moral confusion, and at the end of the decade Lumet produced and directed the ambitious Prince of the City (1981), a veritable epic portrait of corruption in the New York City police force. It could be the bookend to Serpico, the first major American film to seriously and unflinchingly confront police corruption as a systemic issue.

Producer: Martin Bregman
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenplay: Waldo Salt, Norman Wexler; Peter Maas (book)
Cinematography: Arthur J. Ornitz
Art Direction: Douglas Higgins
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
Film Editing: Dede Allen, Richard Marks (co-editor)
Cast: Al Pacino (Officer Frank Serpico), John Randolph (Chief Sidney Green), Jack Kehoe (Tom Keough), Biff McGuire (Capt. Insp. McClain), Barbara Eda-Young (Laurie), Cornelia Sharpe (Leslie Lane), Tony Roberts (Bob Blair), John Medici (Pasquale), Allan Rich (Dist. Atty. Herman Tauber), Norman Ornellas (Don Rubello), Ed Grover (Insp. Lombardo), Al Henderson (Peluce), Hank Garrett (Malone).
C-130m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning.

by Sean Axmaker