Film 9 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The other films I plan to watch for the challenge are here.
Week 9: Hardboiled Wonderland
Challenge: Watch an unseen film from the Hardboiled Wonderland 1970s list of crime films.
Film I Chose: Serpico (1973)
Okay, so this is the week 9 film, which is correct for this week, but due to time issues I’ve had to skip weeks 7 and 8 for now – I will return to them! I just didn’t want to get too far behind, and I had a good opportunity to watch this one.
I’ve had Serpico on my watch list for a couple of years now, both because I’ve been trying to catch up on 1970s films and because I like Sidney Lumet films. I definitely had some incorrect preconceptions about this one, though – perhaps because of the one-word title and having an idea it was about a rogue kind of cop, I thought it would be like an Italian cop version of Shaft, and be action-y and funky.
It is not.
But that’s okay. It’s actually based on the true story of Frank Serpico, a cop who blew the whistle the corruption and graft endemic to the NYPD in the ’60s and early ’70s. I was sadly unaware of any of that history until I looked it up after the film.
It’s pretty clear from the first time we see Serpico out on the beat with his first partner that at the very least, Serpico is more on the level than pretty much anyone around him – they stop in at a diner and he quickly finds out there’s a whole web of “rules” to follow with the diner owner due to the system of favors he and the cops do for each other. And this is just scratching the surface.
As Serpico moves into plain-clothes work he finds himself more and more out of place, until he’s handed a payoff and he tries to figure out what to do with. As he tries to get advice on how to survive in the force without taking payoffs, he finds he’s less and less trusted by his fellow cops, which is understandable and yet ironic, as he’s clearly the only truly trustworthy person on the force.
I was a bit sleepy, which may account for some of the confusion I felt toward the second half, as Serpico is moving around precincts – I couldn’t always keep track of where he was and how the graft was going down in each place, and what his relationships were to the other cops. There was one part where a cop clearly helped him, but I’m not sure how he ended up partnered with that cop or why, later, he wasn’t anymore. An eventual rewatch will hopefully clear up some of these issues.
Anyway, despite it being more of a slow-burn than I was expecting, I did find the film a fascinating look at a piece of history that I simply knew nothing about, and Pacino is about as good as I’ve seen him as a guy who literally just wants to do his job and be left alone, but is unable to do that within the system and can’t stomach giving in to it. He’s a short, relatively quiet-spoken, well-educated, beatnik-looking hero, but he’s a hero nonetheless.
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