Serpico (1973)

De agent Serpico weigert om, wat de rest van zijn collega's wel doen, een deel van het geld aan te nemen dat de agenten geregeld afnemen van de plaatselijke criminelen. Niemand wil met Serpico werken, en hij verkeert in constant gevaar om door zijn partners in levensbedreigende situaties geplaatst te worden.

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Adapted by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler from Peter Maas's book, Sidney Lumet's drama portrays the real-life struggle of an honest New York City cop against a corrupt system. Neophyte officer Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is determined not to let his job get in the way of his individuality. Despite his colleagues' leery reactions, he keeps one foot firmly planted in the counterculture, sporting a beard and love beads and living in bohemian Greenwich Village, while he performs his police duties with dispatch. Serpico's peers genuinely ostracize him, however, when he refuses to take bribes like everybody else. Appalled ...
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by the extent of police corruption, Serpico goes to his superiors, but when he discovers that they have ignored his charges, he takes the potentially fatal step of breaking the blue wall of silence and going public with his exposé. Serpico's revelations trigger an independent investigation by the Knapp Commission, but they also make him a marked man, permanently changing his life. Shot on location with a gritty emphasis on documentary-style realism, Serpico presents a city in decay both literally and morally, as everybody is in on the take, and the cops and criminals are almost interchangeable. Released in late 1973, after months of revelations of Presidential malfeasance in the breaking Watergate scandal, Serpico's true story of bureaucratic depravity touched a cultural nerve, and the film became a hit with both critics and audiences, particularly for Pacino's complex performance as the honest, long-haired whistleblower. One year after his star-making triumph in The Godfather, Pacino was nominated for an Oscar again, and lost again; Lumet and Pacino would reunite two years later for another true New York story, Dog Day Afternoon.
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Shot on location on the crime-filled streets of New York City, Sidney Lumet's unflinching adaptation of Peter Maas's best-selling book is a rousing portrait of courage in the face of insidious corruption. This is a motif that Lumet would continue to mine in later films, including 1981's PRINCE OF THE CITY and 1997's NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN. Al Pacino is forcefully real as Frank Serpico, an independent young recruit entering the police force in the late 1960s, fulfilling a childhood dream. The good old boys of the NYPD lose no time in initiating Serpico into the ways of cutting corners, forging documents, and tak...
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ing payoffs from local gambling operations and narcotic rings. His refusal to take illegal protection money and his counterculture lifestyle make Serpico a target for harassment by his unified and powerful peers. Lumet hones in on the evocative details of Serpico's personal struggles and inner turmoil as his obsessive fight for truth begins to have disastrous effects on his personal life and threatens his safety. SERPICO is a stellar example of gritty '70s filmmaking, featuring another electrifying performance from Pacino.
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