Word: lumet
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...accept Prince of the City as merely unravelling the ramifications of a police officer turning on his brethren, it fascinates absolutely, even over a corpulent three hours. Ciello is an informer, a curiously ambiguous role throughout American history, and director Sidney Lumet has accepted and used brilliantly that ambiguity, refusing to portray Ciello as either hero or villain. Americans have never been entirely comfortable with the informer, but informers have periodically (though often only temporarily) emerged as heroes. The name-namers of the McCarthy period offer the most striking example of evaporating national acclaim, while the Watergate tattlers have generally...
...Directed by Sidney Lumet...
Screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet...
...Lumet has often been able to elicit electrifying performances from his lead actors, and here Treat Williams joins the likes of Al Pacino in Serpico and Peter Finch in Network. But Lumet is just as skilled at finding, among little-known or even unprofessional actors, those faces that taken together compose a vision-grotesque, but never inhuman-of the urban landscape...
...drawn. Dina Merrill, while quite nutty as Max's institutionalized wife, is left stranded between farce and tragedy. The playwright is inconsistently written as both a pretentious aesthete and an idealized heartthrob; finally his plot strand peters out, and poor Weller disappears without explanation. By then, Allen and Lumet have forsaken both laughter and romance for some muddy philosophizing: Hollywood deal making, it abruptly turns out, is a metaphor for male-female relationships. Maybe so, but it is hard to believe that the creators of Just Tell Me What You Want ever told each other just what movie they...