Serpico (1973)
Director: Sidney Lumet
Entertainment grade: B-
History grade: B
Formed in 1970, the Knapp commission discovered widespread and deep-rooted corruption in the New York police department. This followed a story given to the New York Times by two whistleblowers, sergeant David Durk and officer Frank Serpico.
Crime
In February 1971, Serpico (Al Pacino) is on his way to hospital after being hit in the face by a bullet during a drug raid in Brooklyn. “Guess who got shot?” asks one policeman of another: “Serpico.” “Think a cop did it?” the other asks. “I know six cops said they’d like to,” the first replies. In real life, as in the film, Serpico’s whistleblowing earned him the enmity of many colleagues. He was shot by the “perp” he was trying to arrest. The real Frank Serpico tells the story similarly to the way it is told in the film, though the film-makers replaced his modest revolver with a more dramatic-looking 9mm automatic. Serpico alleges that his fellow police officers left the scene and a local man called an ambulance for him.
Corruption
The action flashes back to the beginning of Serpico’s career in the 1960s. He is a fine cop, but an outsider: he goes to Spanish literature classes and learns to dance ballet. His colleagues presume he is gay. When he is handed some cash in an envelope, he tries to report it, but is told to drop the subject. “Let’s face it, who can trust a cop who doesn’t take money?” asks one fellow cop. “I mean, you are a little weird.” He moves from precinct to precinct. Instead of fitting in, he finds more and more corruption.
Style
Al Pacino’s performance as the focused, hard-edged and yet hippie-ish Serpico is exceptional. Director Sidney Lumet’s knowledge of New York City locations was unsurpassed: the movie was filmed in four of the city’s five boroughs, leaving out only Staten Island. These days, though, the movie feels languorous and overlong – even though Waldo Salt’s original 240-page screenplay (one page corresponds to about a minute of screen time) was cut in half by co-screenwriter Norman Wexler. Furthermore, gender politics have moved on since 1973. The characters of Serpico’s two girlfriends are hopelessly underdeveloped. One is a manic pixie dream ballerina, the other is a whiny doormat, and both of them are inexplicably desperate for him to marry them and have babies – which doesn’t seem like a sensible idea. Also, the scene in which he buddies up to a rape suspect doesn’t exactly say “good cop” to a 21st-century audience, even if he is trying to get the guy to dob in his fellow perps.
Characters
Serpico tells friendly cop Bob Blair (Tony Roberts) about the corruption problems, and they try to take the story to the mayor’s office – but they’re snubbed again. Blair is a fictional character. He stands in for Serpico’s real-life friend David Durk, though he plays a smaller part in the story than Durk did. In 1971, after the story of NYPD corruption first broke, Sam Peckinpah wanted to make this movie as a two-hander, with Paul Newman as Durk and Robert Redford as Serpico. The version which made it to the screen followed Peter Maas’s biography of Serpico and wrote Durk out. Some of his contemporaries saw this as a historical injustice, and it’s certainly true that Frank Serpico is much more widely remembered than David Durk. Still, almost all of the characters in the movie have been renamed and fictionalised. Historical film-makers sometimes have to do this for legal reasons, even if they’d rather tell a more accurate story.
Justice
When he finally gets an investigation launched, Serpico is cynical about it: “A few funky cops thrown to the wolves to protect [the fictional commissioner] Delaney and those guys who’ve known about this sh*t for years and won’t do a f*cking thing about it. That’s why I won’t testify.” The whiny doormat girlfriend finally leaves him. Then comes the drug raid and the shooting. Anonymous cards sent to him at the hospital have “get well soon” messages crossed out, and instead wish him a “slow death”. This is accurate. At the end of the film, a title card says: “Serpico is now living somewhere in Switzerland.” Serpico returned to the United States in the early 1980s, and still occasionally surfaces – he wrote an article last year questioning police conduct in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Verdict
Parts of it drag, and it leaves out a key character, but this is a strong biopic of Frank Serpico.
