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.
