The great Sidney Lumet (who was beat out of his Oscar for
Network by Avildsen's
Rocky at the 1977 ceremony) has made four films thus far centering on Police corruption.
Serpico was the first and it is still the best, the gold standard by which all others must be judged forever. That it is based on a true story and a real guy makes it all the more remarkable. A great movie and a fantastic performance by Pacino before he slipped into easy self parody.
The subsequent Lumet flicks that deal with the same basic subject matter are
Prince of the City (1981),
Q&A (1990) and
Night Falls on Manhattan (1997).
Prince is also based on a true story but the other two are fictions, though full of authenticity.
Prince of the City is good and has the best film work of both Treat Williams and Jerry Orbach, but its a bit overlong and could have used more focus.
Q&A I like a lot, especially for Nick Nolte's towering performance as an over-the-top psycho cop who is a racist, gay-bashing monster and Nolte has fun with every second of it. It was Timothy Hutton's last shot to be a movie star, but the movie fizzled even though it got critical raves. It did introduce me to a new generation of great character actors including Luis Guzmán and Charles S. Dutton. It's based on a book by real New York Judge Edwin Torres, who also wrote the novels that
Carlito's Way was drawn from.
Night Falls On Manhattan really tanked, and while it's kind of a mish-mash of Lumet's previous corruption pictures I like it and it does focus more on the Justice System side of things this time. Andy Garcia never became a movie star either, but he's well cast as the new Assistant District Attorney who is thrown onto a big case when his father (Ian Holm) is one of the wounded cops at a seeming drug bust gone horribly wrong. Another great supporting cast with Richard Dreyfuss as an Alan Dershowitz-style defense attorney and Ron Leibman having a blast chewing up the scenery as the District Attorney. It also has some great character actors to-be including Tony Soprano and Uncle Junior themselves: James Gandolfini and Dominic Chianese. The main thing that holds this one down a bit in quality from the others is that the basic material is by now so familiar there's no new direction to go with it, really. And the opening action scene always seemed really badly staged to me, the kind of stuff you get on an average episode of middling TV fare like
"Hunter". But the outstanding cast definitely makes it worth a look, despite the flaws.
There have been a couple great to good Police corruption movies
not made by Sidney Lumet, like
L.A. Confidential, Narc, Lone Star and
CopLand as well as some very overrated pieces like
Training Day and
Dark Blue in recent years but Sidney Lumet is the undisputed master and
Serpico is the best of the best.