Serpico

I had the opportunity to record Serpico during one of the free preview weekends. It's going to be on again multiple times this week, starting at 4:45 PM tomorrow on Showtime 2, so I sat down this weekend to watch it and do a post on it here.

Based on the true story of New York police detective Frank Serpico, the movie starts off in 1971 with his being shot in the face and taken to hospital. The police chief, Sidney Green (John Randolph) is informed, and he worries that Serpico was shot by another cop. After all, several police officers have already said they wouldn't mind seeing Serpico shot.

Flash back several years, to when Serpico graduated the police academy. He'd always dreamed of becoming a police officer, and his family are understandably proud of him. Serpico becomes a patrolman, partnered with an older cop, and it's here that he has his first taste of corruption, when a diner owner offers both of them free chicken soup. Frank doesn't want chicken soup, and is willing to pay for the roast beef sandwich he does want, but the older cop is horrified that Serpico won't just shut up and take the free meal.

Then on the police radio, he hears of a potential rape in progress. He's probably in the closest car, but the location is technically in a different sector, so his partner tries to let the cops in the other sector handle it, which doesn't seem good for public safety. When Serpico does arrest one of the suspects, the other cops pressure him not to take credit for the arrest.

It continues like this, while Frank tries to become a detective and starts dating a woman who studies ballet. Frank is also unconventional in other ways, growing his hair out and wanting to patrol in plain clothes and his own car, since he figures this is a better way to catch criminals. The downside to this is that during one arrest, some cops in uniform don't recognize him (and to be fair, why should they).

The monetary corruption continues, and Serpico contacts Bob Blair (Tony Roberts), a man in the Mayor's office investigating police internal affairs. Blair wants Frank to testify, although that carries the obvious risk that cops will know who threw a giant spotlight on the rampant corruption going on and whom to target. Frank starts thinking about going to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, it's increasingly becoming clear that the corruption isn't just beat cops taking bribes from local businesses and drug dealers, but that it goes all the way to the top, and has for decades. The idea that the brass would be ignorant of what's going on is ludicrous, of course. The police increasingly turn against their colleague Serpico, which is going to lead to his shooting when, during a drug bust, two of them refused to back him up and let the drug dealer shoot him.

Al Pacino gives a pretty good performance, while location shooting greatly enhances the feeling of realism. This is a New York City that's crumbling both physcially and societally, with the police and much of the political class being responsible for a good share of that destruction. Serpico is highly worth watching, and is available on Blu-ray if you don't have the Showtime package.

Serpico is a movie that's relevant 50 years on, largely because police corruption has never gone away, and never will as long as we have a state that has so much power that nobody can enforce all the laws and they have to be enforced arbitrarily. Of course, nobody wants learn that lesson, because you've got half the country that still believes in "law and order", while the other half really cares more about law enforcement being used for their ends against people in the first half than they actually do about corruption and state-sanctioned violence. (And to be fair, Serpico himself is shown to be rather violent when dealing with criminals like the rapists.) One doubts that the lessons that should be learned from Serpico are the ones that will be learned.