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Tony Manero (John Travolta) in Saturday Night Fever and Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) in Boogie Nights have one major thing in common: They both have posters of Al Pacino as Serpico on their bedroom walls. As the real-life NYPD detective whose integrity cost him virtually everything (and almost cost him his life), Pacino became one of the icons of gritty, realistic 1970s filmmaking. Released in 1973, between the first two Godfather movies, this is the true story of Frank Serpico, a long-haired, idealistic, iconoclastic cop who reluctantly goes undercover to investigate dirty colleagues who are on the take. This is one of the definitive Pacino performances, along with his role as Michael Corleone in the Godfather saga, and Sonny the bungling bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon (which reunited him with his Serpico director, Sidney Lumet)--and Pacino was nominated for a best actor Oscar for all of them (although he wouldn't actually win until 1992's Scent of a Woman). --Jim Emerson
Terrific - Reviewed on 2008-09-25
It was Al Pacino's first big screen masterpiece of acting. The Godfather was really Marlon Brando's showcase vehicle, and The Godfather, Part Two was a year away, while Dog Day Afternoon, also with Lumet, was another year further out. Pacino's Frank Serpico covers alot of ground in his time on the force, and the two and a quarter hour film moves so briskly that it seems much longer, but in the good sense. As a biopic, it wisely focuses on the meat of the man's public impact, not a cradle to grave psychodrama. We see the thousand little ways that corruption breeds and spreads. Not only is evident it out and out graft and bribery, but in parking ticket quotas, freeby lunches, and the like of countless seemingly harmless acts. Serpico will have none of it, as he is shunted from precinct to precinct, and mocked by his fellow cops as a goody-goody, untrustworthy, and dangerous- all because he's decent and ethical. The non-stop harassment eats away at his insides and his mind, destroys his relationships with women, and lands him on a mission to clean things up, by whatever means he can.
However, bureaucracy slows down his quest, until he connects with another cop, Bob Blair (Tony Roberts), who guides him across minefields of political machinations, until they both decide to go public to the New York Times. Consequently, Serpico is abandoned on a drug bust, by his partners, and shot in the face- the point at which the film begins, then proceeds to its coda. The film ends with Serpico going public at the Knapp Commission hearings, and then we get the credits telling us of the aftermath. Sidney Lumet had a perfect grasp of the streets and the times in this film, and the old clichés about them not making films like this any more is true. Compare this to the Academy Award-level `issues' films of recent vintage- The Hours, Million Dollar Baby, Monster, or this year's Brokeback Mountain- and there's simply no comparison. Realistic, but poetic, films like this are just not made by the damnable Hollywood machine any longer. And few independent films can afford the budget and time needed to craft so meticulous a work- Joe Carnahan's recent Ray Liotta vehicle Narc being a welcome exception. Yet, films like this, Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, All The President's Men, Apocalypse Now, and the like, still tug at the American psyche. Surely, there will be a time in the not-too distant future that such films will be welcome again?
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