Awards and Honors for SERPICO

Serpico received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor (Al Pacino), Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Waldo Salt, Norman Wexler)

Other awards included the Golden Globe Best Actor Award (Pacino) and a nomination for Best Motion Picture Drama, the National Board of Review Best Actor award, three British Academy Award (BAFTA) nominations: Best Actor, Best Direction (Lumet, also nominated for Murder on the Orient Express, 1974), and the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music (Mikis Theodorakis)

Additional honors include the David di Donatello (Italy) Best Foreign Actor Award, a Directors Guild of America nomination for Lumet, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (Salt and Wexler), and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (mystery writers) nomination for Salt and Wexler

It also garnered a Grammy (recording industry) nomination to Theodorakis for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture

Pacino's performance in Serpico is generally considered one of his best. His role as Serpico is ranked number 40 on the American Film Institute (AFI) "100 Years, 100 Heroes and Villains" list. The film is also ranked 84th on AFI's "100 Years, 100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies" list.

The Critics' Corner: SERPICO

"It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. The method––sudden contrasts in tempo, lighting, sound level––seems almost crude, but it reflects the quality of Detective Serpico's outrage, which, in our society, comes to look like an obsession bordering on madness. ... You should find the film most provocative, a remarkable record of one man's rebellion against the sort of sleaziness and second-ratedness that has affected so much American life, from the ingredients of its hamburgers to the ethics of its civil servants and politicians."
– Vincent Canby, New York Times, December 6, 1973

"Pacino dominates the entire film. His inner personal torment is vividly detailed, manifested first in the breakup of an affair with Cornelia Sharpe and later, much more terribly, in the wreck of his love for Barbara Eda-Young."
– Variety, 1973

"Al Pacino gives a masterful performance as Serpico. He proves that, although there is a strong resemblance, he is no rubber-stamp Dustin Hoffman."
– Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News, 1973

"...Serpico is as enjoyable and engrossing as a film can be without being a work of art....the script by Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, 1969) and Norman Wexler (Joe, 1970)...is intelligent and adroit. It does not pretend to explain what it doesn't know...Serpico is a street movie, like The French Connection (1971), like certain films by Elia Kazan and Jules Dassin, because to these directors, as to Lumet, a back alley and a boulevard are as real as their bedrooms and bathrooms; because they seem more at home with wall-to-wall asphalt than with wall-to-wall carpeting. In such films the cameraman is extremely important, and Serpico's Arthur J. Ornitz has the requisite ultrahigh sensitivity to light and shadow locked in Manichaean combat over the city, to the way faces flatten out into vapidity in overilluminated offices, or become prematurely eclipsed in sunless metropolitan chasms."
- John Simon, Reverse Angle

"The theme is richly comic, and the film is great fun, even though it sacrifices Serpico's story––one of the rare hopeful stories of the time––for a cynical, downbeat finish."
– Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt & Co., 1984)

"Serpico is a fascinating instance of overt New York realism succumbing to the introspection of the actor. Lumet may have wanted a lively drama of cops on the take and big city cover-ups. But Pacino diverted it into the ballad of a sad, aloof hippie. It is his cutest film, a self-righteous pose."
– David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film

"Lumet's best film of the Seventies..."
– - Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema

"Like a practice run for Lumet's Prince of the City (1981), this deals with police corruption in New York... whereas the later film built up an impressively complex series of narrative strands and psychological motivations, this is far more one-dimensional, and is so laxly structured that its rambling story seems to last longer than the (almost) three-hour Prince of the City. Another problem, these days, is Pacino's characterisation; he seems at times more like a misplaced hippy than a plainclothes cop."
- Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Film Guide

"One of Sidney Lumet's very best movies in an exemplary career, Serpico is a highly entertaining movie about grim police corruption in New York....Serpico tells the tale of Frank's personal ordeal, while painting a vivid and credible portrait of the force at all levels. For a film that one would think the NYPD would never allow to be made on the city streets, all the settings and precincts look 100% authentic, from the fingerprint and file rooms to the grungy bathrooms. The show has an enormous cast of real-looking faces, and many small parts are played by names that would later become familiar - M. Emmet Walsh, James Tolkan, F. Murray Abraham, Kenneth McMillan, Judd Hirsch, even Tony Lo Bianco in a tiny bit. Look fast and you'll also spot unbilled Jaime Sanchez (The Wild Bunch, 1969) in a towel in the police gym."
- Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

by Rob Nixon