GOLDEN GRAHAMS

THIS MONTH Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

It’s a mystery to me why Sidney Lumet’s other corrupt-cops drama is so underseen. I mean, everybody’s heard of Serpico, even if they haven’t watched it, and those who have tout it as a classic. But mention the vastly superior 1981 drama Prince of the City – also based on a real New York cop, Robert Leuci, who ratted on his colleagues – and you’ll likely be met with blank stares.

I suppose Serpico gets all of the attention because of Al Pacino in the lead role, and because Frank Serpico’s status as an undercover cop allows the Godfather star to play dress-up in every scene. Hell, if you take a drink each time his hair and beard change length, you’ll be in a jail cell, drunk and disorderly, by the hour mark. Prince of the City, meanwhile, gives us a likewise unravelling but far less showy Treat Williams as Detective Daniel Ciello, the leader of the Special Unit of Investigation (SUI) that works narcotics. No concrete reason is offered as to why he turns informer on behalf of the DA’s commission of enquiry, though Ciello, also crooked, likely does it out of fear, remorse, guilt and a shot at redemption, given the small silver crucifix hanging on a chain around his thick neck.

His one condition is that he won’t turn on his partners in the SUI. ‘I sleep with my wife, but I live with my partners,’ he growls. But can he really keep them, and himself, out of the headlines once he begins to topple rows of dominoes in both directions – down to the streets and the Mafia that runs them, and up to the offices of the DA and the chambers of the judges?

Gloomily shot in a rundown city held together by lies, coercion and duct tape, this monumental drama features 130 locations and 126 speaking parts – acarefully assembled mosaic that surely influenced The Wire. Throughout its 167-minute runtime, there’s just a single shot of the sky. For Lumet, the sky indicates freedom, and that one shot shows the grey heavens hanging over the railway tracks as Ciello stares from a bridge, contemplating suicide.

In his book Making Movies, Lumet says, ‘Good camera work is not pretty pictures. It should augment and reveal the theme as fully as the actors and directors do.’

Well, Prince of the City, shot by Andrzej Bartkowiak, is a textbook example: by eschewing mid-range lenses, all spaces in the film are elongated or foreshortened, suggesting that nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. The background lighting dims as Danny becomes increasingly unsure of his surroundings, until only our ‘hero’ and his partners are lit. Backed into a corner, they are his entire focus. It’s subtle, but powerful: no less a maestro than Akira Kurosawa praised the film for the beauty of its camerawork.

My thoughts naturally turned to this great picture when Treat Williams sadly passed in June. He spent a month with the NYPD before filming, and it’s his best work – the then 28-year-old actor fashioning a magnetic character who’s by turns sexy, tough, forceful, paranoid and broken. Pacino gets enough attention, so watch Williams in Prince of the City instead. As Time Out said, ‘It’s Serpico all over again, but revised, enlarged and immeasurably improved.’