Word: lumet
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...room. For real. With his wife's inheritance at stake. His plot has wit and intricacy going for it-so much so that it cannot be described, lest the fun be spoiled for those who have not yet seen Ira Levin's original Broadway hit. Director Sidney Lumet has, perhaps, permitted the volume to be turned up too high, with the result that Caine and the other principals, Christopher Reeve and Dyan Cannon, sometimes seem screechy when they reach for the high notes. But one can still appreciate the professionalism with which Levin crafted them and the larky...
Prince of the City. A corrupt New York cop (Treat Williams) further corrupts himself as he tries to expiate his crimes. Sidney Lumet has directed a fiercely acted and harrowing descent into paranoia's hellish center...
...Lumet decided to focus almost entirely on Ciello, ignoring most of the other questions this complicated film raises. New York City, for example, is almost entirely absent. Lumet shoots almost all scenes inside, presumably to show the profound isolation of Ciello's--or anyone else's--behavior. Lumet may have thought he already made his New York Movie in Dog Day Afternoon, with its wonderful characterization of the city's good-natured malevolence, or in Serpico, with its Good Guys vs. Bad Guys simplicity. One can only hope, by the way, that Lumet concentrated on interiors because he wanted...
...Lumet wisely does not go the ethnic cross-section route in selecting Ciello's fellow cops, avoiding the one Black, one Jew, one Irishman, one Italian and one WASP solidarity of scores of war movies. The New York Police force, its press releases notwithstanding, still operates in ethnic cliques, still works on a team concept. Lumet does not dress it up with any phony cross-cultural exchange. Even though more artistic exploration has focused on the criminal class than on its pursuers, anyone who has bothered to look at cops has seen the remarkable, almost symbiotic relationship among them...
...very closeness of the relationship among partners in the face of such ambiguities presents the central theme of the movie. Lumet could have used the disintegration of that bond as an opening for examining the causes of Ciello's behavior. Danny Ciello somehow couldn't fit in. He loved the camaraderie, but something--just what is maddeningly unclear--made him rebel at his fellow detectives scorn for the system. At least partially driven by self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, Ciello is not noble, just understandable. He risks his job and his life to turn on his fellow officers, a move...