Word: lumet
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...Movie Director Sidney Lumet will need all his little gray cells, as Agatha Christie would put it. Next month he starts shooting outside London her 40-year-old thriller Murder on the Orient Express. Albert Finney will play Christie's eggheaded detective Hercule Poirot...
Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler follow the structure of the Peter Maas biography. The portrait of the wounded Serpico, being shuttled to a hospital from Harlem, hooks us as the film opens; we then flashback to the highlights of the policeman's career and life. These chart the growth of the man's disillusionment and discontent, as well as the strength of his personal integrity. The film develops with its title character: the derailment of Serpico's life both by those police who were corrupt and those who refused to inflict punishment, carries as much...
...accept the reportage of Peter Maas as gospel. In their film, no other cop besides Serpico and an idealistic inspector are at all virtuous; Serpico's Ivy League associate, David Durk, is here preening and pompous, nothing like the dedicated, befuddled naif whom even Maas found sincere. And Lumet, Salt and Wexler never detail the reluctance of police higher-ups to listen to Serpico: New York City and police officials are cardboard figures of mishandled authority. Because the film's view of the force is so sketchy, we get little sense of accomplishment or relief from the formation...
Most damaging of all is that essential human material is skimped. Serpico's honesty, and his appreciation of the diversity of urban life, are scarcely rooted. Lumet lets us glimpse the man's Old World Italian family (his father and brother are cobblers) and his Greenwich Village girlfriends. He creates locker-room comedy out of Serpico's love for opera and ballet. But the crucial gap between his personal life and public service, and the despair that drove him to paranoia and defensive put-ons are only vaguely rendered, like a plainclothesman's arrest sheets...
These episodes suggest that Serpico is too driven to maintain a decent emotional relationship, so confused and compulsive that he revels in the chance to assume fresh identities with every dis guise. Such subtleties, however, are drowned out in the prevailing frenzy of Sidney Lumet's direction, and by the musical score of Mikis Theodorakis, which sounds like a patchwork of his music from Z and a concert of favorite folk songs by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Band...