Programme Notes: Serpico
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Serpico When talking about his classic 1973 film Serpico, veteran director Sidney Lumet described its crusading protagonist in a way that would prove insightful in more ways than one. Frank Serpico was, he said, ‘a hippie dressed as a cop. If he hadn’t been able to protest against corruption, he would have found a reason to protest against the colour of his uniform.’ To my mind, one of the abiding images of 70s American cinema– with its tumultuous and lively creative blossoming at the crux of the counterculture period – is of Al Pacino as Frank Serpico. There he is, with his varying degrees of shaggy facial hair, bohemian wooden beads, and... a badge. He’s perhaps the most anti-establishment cop of mainstream American film up to that point. And he was perfectly poised, as was the real man, as an avatar for anti-corruption in the police force. In a greater sense, he also stands in for the spirit of social justice, righteous rebellion, and fatalism at the brokenness of society that permeated the culture of the era. But to begin with, Frank Serpico was just one more Brooklyn-born Italian-American guy who joined the NYPD in 1960. By 1972, he had not only retired from active duty but had nearly torn down the entire edifice of city police corruption with him as he went. At great risk to life and limb, Serpico courageously came forward with allegations about the systemic and aggressive corruption he witnessed and was asked to partake in – often dirty money from shaking down drug dealers. He testified before what became known as the Knapp Commission, sharing his own experiences as a street cop and then a plain clothes officer throughout the previous decade, with increasing mutual antipathy between him and not only his fellow cops but his superiors, who generally turned their heads the other way. In 1971, before testifying, he would be shot in the face under mysterious circumstances during a drug bust: Lumet depicts those events as quite clearly the work of those who wish to silence Serpico for good. As forces coalesce around Serpico in this dirty, topsy-turvy world, the visual logic of the film also grows more paranoid From early on, Lumet’s compositions are tight and busy; they only grow more so as the film progresses. Hewas well-known for his ability to compose complex shots in tight interior spaces. He rarely used artificial light, giving natural shade and texture to the faces he often filmed in medium close-up. Lumet’s use of deep focus is notable near the start of the film, where a simple phone call to a NYPD desk about Serpico being shot is elevated to grandiose drama by the painterly aesthetic. It’s an unusual choice, since usually deep focus is more associated with the lavish, baroque thrills of Brian De Palma or the consciously beautiful mise-en-scene of Orson Welles rather than a street filmmaker like Lumet. But the moments are well-deployed, adding a sort of visual italics to particular scenes where the audience should be attempting to take in the enormity and isolation faced by the protagonist. In many ways, Serpico is a tried and true Sidney Lumet picture. He had made nearly twenty by this point, so the man was already well-practiced, to say the least, by the time he hit an exciting stride in the early seventies. Like so many of the best of his films, it is naturalistic, shot on location in New York City, chock-full of the grizzled faces of character actors and with hundreds of small speaking parts, with dialogue plain-speaking and eloquent all at once, with a propensity for drawing memorable performances from his actors. He was a stickler for long rehearsals, an approach which suited the likes of Pacino, whose background was on the stage. In a counterculture era of the early 1970s, at the peak of anti-Vietnam War protests and virulent anti-establish-ment feeling, a cop hero likely presented another problem: audience sympathy. This easily could – and should have, perhaps – felt like another cop movie about the difficulties faced by the street policeman, a subgenre that can be very satisfying and throw up sufficient moral quandary but rarely produces the kind of masterpiece that Lumet created with Serpico. It was a complex, even byzantine story of corruption with a large cast of characters that the audience had to be made to understand clearly, but its contours remain countercultural in spirit: in a time when cities were crumbling, crime was rampant, and trust in traditional institutions was at an all-time low – particularly in New York – Serpico was exactly the right kind of hero. Beyond this, Serpico touched on an overarching concern that had long haunted Lumet’s work: a fascination with American law and order, justice, and the justice system – and the emotional and social truth that exists beyond it. Repeatedly, from Twelve Angry Men (1957) to Network (1976) and even in his other film with Pacino, looking at the criminal perspective in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Lumet took a scalpel to the flaws of storied American institutions and the individuals they had a tendency to crush That fascination is also in keeping with the period in which Lumet first cut his teeth in directing: the golden age of television in the 1950s. While the House of Un-American Activities Committee (known as HUAC) ravaged the talent of Hollywood, many writers took refuge under pseudonyms and went to the East Coast to work onstage, radio, or TV. It was during his period directing television that Lumet first showed quiet solidarity with left-wing causes: he directed 26 episodes of a long-running and popular show You Are There, hosted by Walter Cronkite and focusing on various events in world history, which were co-screenwritten by no less than three blacklisted screenwriters. Had the information got out, the careers of all involved – including Lumet’s – would have been ruined. It is telling that on Serpico, the blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt (who had a remarkable comeback in the 70s, also penning Midnight Cowboy and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home) was instrumental in adapting the story for the screen. Seen through the eyes of those who survived the blacklist, the thinking which guides this man sounds an awful lot like the moral bravery of the Hollywood Ten, who flouted the conventions of McCarthyism and landed themselves in exile as a result (much like Serpico: he has no one to turn to, and by the conclusion of the film, is alone on the kerb awaiting passage to live in Europe, camera slowly zooming out to reveal the emptiness around him). It seems like no mistake that so many of the blacklisted creatives of the HUAC period also went to Europe to live and work undogged by the eyes and judgements of their fellow Americans. There’s an anecdote that Al Pacino likes to tell about his time preparing for his lead role in Serpico: he first told it to Playboy in 1979, again to Vanity Fair in 2019, and likely, given the actor’s propensity for telling a good yarn, countless times in between. He was lucky enough, as a young Method actor, to have access to the man he would be playing, and one day Pacino asked the former NYPD officer why he didn’t just take the dirty money and give it away to charity, or something, rather than make such a fuss. With the characteristic humour and oddball self-belief that Pacino personifies so well, Serpico replied, ‘If I’d have done that, what kind of person would I be when I listen to Beethoven?’ Christina Newland Film critic
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