50 Years Ago: Serpico

The release date of the motion picture Serpico (1973) was 50 years ago today.

We went back and re-watched this classic of my youth a few months ago, prompted by Isaac Butler’s excellent book on The Method, which reminded us that this kind of quasi-documentary realistic aesthetic is just what the Method is suited to do best. I am astounded to realize how quickly Hollywood adapted and produced this ripped-from-the-headlines blockbuster. NYPD officer Frank Serpico testified before the Knapp Commission in late 1971. Two years later, it’s a classic movie, one of Al Pacino’s four or five best performances. (I was going to add “and one of Sidney Lumet’s best films”, which is true, but Lumet made so many other amazing films I wouldn’t begin to know how to rank them).

The era in which this movie was made stakes a strong claim to being the height of Hollywood cinema as an art form. The window was open only a short time, between the relinquishing of the Code in the late ’60s, and the descent back into universal childishness that arrived in the early 1980s. As a lover of history and cinema both I watch movies from this era like someone in a desert watches a glass of water. It’s a very odd feeling, young ‘uns, when you cross a certain hump and begin to see your childhood across a gulf of half a century.

A couple of memories from that time:

1) Mad Magazine’s parody, Serpicool, which was of course my first introduction to the film. No one was going to bring an eight year old to this picture in 1973, nor would I have wanted to have gone. Rather, I saw The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in a theatre that year, which was age-appropriate. On the other hand, I also saw The Day of the Dolphin, which was less so.

2) An expression of the zeitgeist: I have a distinct memory of seeing my cousin around this time, when he was an undercover narcotics detective with the Connecticut State Police and looking VERY Serpico-esque.

For a lot of people, I imagine that was the extent of the takeaway from this film. It was novel enough to see a hippie cop on movie screens, and to see all those gritty scenes of decaying New York, the crime, the drugs, the garbage. But the evergreen takeaway is, or ought to be, the movie’s message, one I have always found inspirational. Frank Serpico (who still lives, by the way) is my idea of the highest kind of American hero, and we need his kind of example today more than ever. Someone who believes in doing the right thing no matter the consequences, no matter who it alienates, no matter what cost to your own bottom line. Our institutions, devised in the Age of Reason, are intended to serve everyone equally. Privileging one class of people over the citizenry as a whole stinks in God’s nostrils, whether you’re a cop on the take, or a President…on the take. It has been depressing to see so little courage on tap from political leaders over the last seven years. Perhaps even more so because Serpico showed us what it looks like.

Hipsters, pause the next time you walk by 778 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and bow your head for a minute. That’s where Frank Serpico got shot in the face for doing the right thing.