SERPICO
Directed by SIDNEY LUMET
Screenplay by WALDO SALT and NORMAN WEXLER
Wonderful potential: a loose dramatization of the career of Frank Serpico, an undercover cop who in 1971 was instrumental in exposing corruption of almost grotesque proportions within the New York City police department. A chance to deal with difficult questions: What is it that makes a cop resist, then fight against a system of dubious morality that is accepted, even defended within the department? When can such resistance lead to or ever require informing? What moves — or compels — a man to be a cop?
Wonderful potential, and wasted. Serpico has some brutal surface flash and an acetylene performance by Al Pacino in the title role, but its energy is used to dodge all the questions it should have raised and answered. It is not enough to have Serpico reminisce about his childhood, recalling the impression of power and control he got from a couple of guys in blue uniforms, to explain what brought him to the force. It is clearly shown that Serpico is a New York street kid, but this movie asks us not only to accept that a man with that back ground could be aghast over a cop's getting free meals at a restaurant, but that he could violate the most basic code of the street: never inform. The source of Serpico's frantic, sometimes blind moral outrage is never shown.
The movie's onerously monotonous plot proceeds through vignettes of Serpico's honesty being put to the test. Alternating with these are interludes of Serpico on the beat, wearing a variety of disguises, and at home, where his girl friend (Barbara Eda-Young) is assigned the traditional role of helpmeet and sounding board for the hero.
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 .