I pretty much love every film I’ve watched by Sidney Lumet so it was only a matter of time before I got around to this one, especially as it is about a case I’ve actually heard about. Real-life stories like this are hard to portray on film as they involve so many characters and take place over an extended period of time. So it’s very impressive how Lumet was able to distil a basic biography of the man, detail his relationships with women and fellow police officers, and cover his futile attempts to report police corruption over several years in little more than two hours. I don’t much care for films about police as a rule, nor do I have much sympathy for Frank Serpico, but this is an exceptional film on every level.

After an opening scene in which Frank Serpico is rushed to a hospital after being shot, the film portrays the story of his life as an extended flashback. Born to an Italian-American family, he graduates from the police academy in New York City, first serves as an ordinary patrolman and then becomes a plainclothes officer. However he eschews the standard style of the police and prefers more casual clothing which makes him fit in better with the community though he is criticized for looking like a hippie. When another officer casually slips him an envelope filled with cash, he hesitates over what to do. After confiding with Bob Blair, a well-connected officer who he bonds with after attending a seminar on identifying marijuana, he meets with an investigator. However he is simply advised to keep the money. Moving to a new precinct, he is asked to follow along as the police collect payoffs from criminals and local business owners but refuses to accept any money himself. Even going to the mayor yields nothing as the city’s leaders don’t want to alienate the police. Soon Serpico is shunned and distrusted by other officers as word gets around that he doesn’t take money and he fears for his life.

What I particularly liked about this film is how well-rounded it is as a sort of mini-biography of Serpico’s life. It could have focused exclusively on the details and extent of corruption within the ranks of the NYPD but instead this is really the life of just one man. We see how proudly his family congratulates him on graduating from the academy, his love life, how he likes the occasional party and is annoyed when people avoid him when they realize he is a police officer and so on. He’s not an idealist who’s out to change the world. He just feels uncomfortable about taking bribes and prefers to keep his head down. He really only pushes back because his fellow officers keep insisting that he takes the money so that they can feel secure that he is one of them. Grounding the story of his life are the gritty details of the New York City of the era, the clothes, the culture, the street scene and much more. Lumet only very slowly immerses Serpico and hence the audience into the corruption of the police, so that we’re always aware of how much he has to lose, how dangerous it is for him and how easy it would be for him to just take the money and give it to charity as another officer suggests.

It’s a masterpiece of filmmaking on many levels but it has to be admitted that it takes many liberties with the truth. Serpico’s primary ally here Bob Blair is fictional and only partially based on David Durk. In reality, Durk was a fellow whistleblower who testified before the Knapp Commission so this change served to lessen his role. The effect is to isolate Serpico to make it feel that he is the one honest cop in the force. This film also ends without relating the consequences of the commission. It’s a great film about the ordeal of a single man but it leaves room for a wider account of police corruption in New York at the time. I found it impressive that the article in the New York Times was published in 1970, Serpico was shot in 1971 and this film was released in 1973. That’s such a short amount of time in between. The public outrage must have been incredible so even though his superiors and the city government were against him, Serpico certainly had the general public on his side.

I have too little sympathy with the police in general to truly love this film and it’s kind of ludicrous to me that the police could ever be honest in the first place. This is still a very good film and features a fantastic performance by a young Al Pacino but it’s probably among my least liked of the works by Lumet.