Prince of the City (1981), Sidney Lumet's multilayered portrait of police corruption in New York and one cop's decision to inform against his colleagues, depicts, by Lumet's own admission, the corrosive influence of drugs on society. In a 1982 interview with Michel Ciment for the French magazine Positif, Lumet further stated that he was attracted to the project partly because he wanted to explore a more complex portrayal of police than he had done in Serpico (1973), where the focus was mainly on the hero's protest. On a deeper personal level, working on Prince of the City also spurred Lumet to revisit his experience working in the entertainment industry of the 1950s under the blacklist, as he commented in the Ciment interview: "For me, having been raised in a working class environment, my family was poor, my attitude toward a stool pigeon was automatic, going beyond any logical distinction between the criminal and the political. An informer was an informer; it was that simple. I needed to make this film in order for my attitude to change, however."

The source material for Prince of the City was a 1978 nonfiction book of the same title by Robert Daley, the former New York City Police Commissioner for Public Affairs. In a widely publicized case, Robert Leuci, a member of the NYPD's Special Investigation Unit, turned whistleblower. His testimony ultimately led to 52 indictments, primarily within the Special Investigation Unit; most of the cases resulted in conviction.

Orion Pictures, a film distribution company founded in 1978 by former United Artists executives, purchased the rights to the story for $500,000. Ultimately, the film became a co-production between Orion and Warner Brothers. According to Jay Boyer, John Travolta, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino all declined offers to star in the film. David Rabe and Brian De Palma were among the scriptwriters who had attempted adaptations. When Erik Pleskow approached Sidney Lumet to direct, Lumet stipulated that he wanted to cast unknowns and that he must be allowed a three-hour running time. He and his collaborator, the screenwriter and executive producer Jay Presson Allen, produced a 240 page script within a month. Today Jay Presson Allen (1922-2006) is probably best known for her scripts written during the 1960s and early 1970s, among them Marnie (1964), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and Cabaret (1972). In 1980 she produced Lumet's Just Tell Me What You Want; she subsequently served as executive producer for Prince of the City and Deathtrap (1982). Even though the script for Prince of the City condensed many characters and events from the book, it nonetheless contained over a hundred speaking parts. It also required dozens of shooting locations in Long Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. For legal reasons, the script changed the names of the characters, including the protagonist Robert Leuci, who became "Danny Ciello."

Lumet's other main collaborator on the film was the Polish-born cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, who made his feature film debut with this project. Only thirty years old at the time, he had photographed a number of television commercials; his sole large-scale projects were the low-budget crime thriller Deadly Hero (1976) and a made-for-television adaptation of a John Cheever story, The Five Forty-Eight (1979). Lumet said of the film's look: "I decided to shoot the entire film at an aperture of 2.8 in order to give it a certain visual style. I told Andrzej Bartkowiak [...] that I did not want any normal lenses. [...] In order to create an atmosphere of deceit, and false appearances, we only used wide angle and zoom lenses. The lighting in the first half was never on the actors but rather on the background. In the middle of the film, the lighting had to alternate between the foreground and the background, and at the end, on the contrary, the lighting was aimed on the foreground only."

Prince of the City opened in August 1981 with a gradual, "platformed" release to allow it time to develop word-of-mouth business. Initially the movie premiered on three screens in the Cinemas 1, 2 and 3 in New York; Orion also purchased a multi-page advertising spread in the New York Times and TV spots on local cable. Orion followed this with single screen engagements in Los Angeles and Toronto, then the film opened in limited release in a small number of cities before going into wide release in October of that year. The film grossed $8.1 million during its initial release, against an estimated budget of $8.6 million.

In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin particularly admired the performances Lumet drew from the large ensemble cast: "Mr. Lumet's film offers such a sharply detailed landscape, such a rich and crowded portrait, that his characters reveal themselves fully by the ways they move, eat, speak, listen or lie." She added, "[...] the brief characterizations are so keenly drawn that dozens of them stand out with the forcefulness of major performances." Maslin's appraisal of Treat Williams in the lead was more mixed; she argued that the lead actor "does his best work in the early part of the story, when his effort is mostly collaborative with Mr. Lumet and with the other actors. [...] Prince of the City begins with the strength and confidence of a great film and ends merely as a good one." Ultimately, Lumet was awarded Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle, and the film received Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Director and Best Actor; Lumet and Allen also received an Oscar® nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Producer: Burtt Harris
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, Sidney Lumet, from the book by Robert Daley
Director of Photography: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Film Editor: John J. Fitzstephens
Production Design: Tony Walton
Cast: Treat Williams (Danny Ciello); Lindsay Crouse (Carla Ciello); Matthew Laurance (Ronnie); Norman Parker (Richard Capallino); Paul Roebling (Brooks Paige); Jerry Orbach (Gus Levy); Carmine Foresta (Ernie Fallaci); Tony Turco (Danny's father); E. D. Miller (Edelmann).
C-167m.

by James Steffen

Sources:
Boyer, Jay. Sidney Lumet. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Harmetz, Aljean. "How 'Prince of the City' Is Being Platformed." New York Times, July 18, 1981, p.9.
Lombardi, John. "Lumet: the City is his Sound Stage" New York Times Magazine, June 6 1982.
Maslin, Janet. "Screen: Lumet's 'Prince of the City.'" New York Times, August 19, 1981, p.C17.
Rapf, Joanna. Sidney Lumet: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Wolf, William. "Director With A Conscience." New York Magazine, August 10, 1981, pp.54-55.