Rainbow with Egg Underneath and an Elephant

Prince of the City

Reviews
Times Literary Supplement
Sight & Sound
Roger Ebert
Pauline Kael

When constabulary duty's to be done
Times Literary Supplement
8th January, 1982
by Richard Combs
If there weren't so much of Prince of the City, if it didn't work over its subject in such exhaustive detail, there would, strangely enough, be less need to explain what it is. If it were pared down to a more standard feature length (as some of its critics have claimed it could and should be), the psychological connections, the moral and ethical dimensions, would emerge more clearly from the chaotic narrative. As it is, it is not merely long (just short of three hours) but apparently shapeless, not only full of a bewildering number of characters but either willfully vague or coy about the weight that should be attached to any of them. The impression it gives of boundless realistic detail but not much organization has led to glib verdicts.

Prince of the City has been praised for exposing a serious problem: police corruption, the involvement of members of an elite New York narcotics squad in the sort of activities that they are supposed to be policing. Equally, it has been faulted for not going far enough into the problem - in particular, for cloaking the actions of its lead character, based on an actual ex-narcotics detective, in more ambiguity than he deserves. The case against the film has recently argued in these terms in The Guardian, which assumed, that it was a kind of realistic document, took it to task for including some but not enough detail about the hero's own perfidy and then delivered the coup de grace by deciding that such a shaggy accumulation of detail was not meaningful anyway.

But a case for the film might begin by pointing out that it is precisely its sense of structure and style that is most impressive. What, in fact, makes it extraordinary is the way it treats its subject - the vicious circle that turns narcotics officers into part of the problem they are dealing with - through a fragmented narrative that seems to be pulling apart in a myriad of incidents while surreptitiously building into a precise trap. The hero, Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), a member of a privileged, narcotics squad in the NYPD's Special Investigation Unit, is an interesting case history to the extent that he embodies related contradictions - not to the extent that he matches the baseness of his real-life counterpart. Early in the film, Danny is persuaded, out of no clear-cut motive, to become a witness for a committee investigating police corruption. He lays down the condition that he will not inform on any of his own partners - a condition which leads to his covering up his and their own dubious methods while incriminating others, and which rebounds on him when the investigation inevitably spirals out of his control and teams of variously zealous, ambitious and publicity-hungry lawyers begin to see him as a target as well as a witness.

Like much else in the film, the silence or confusion over why Danny "turns" is more apparent than real. Towards the end, one of the district attorneys who has been coaxing him through his espionage against his fellow officers testifies at a conclave of government attorneys who are debating whether or not to indict Danny. He supplies what could very well have been the film's key - Danny, he believes, was trying to make up for the thousand daily corruptions of his work in one grand act of expiation - except that the film is not constructed as a puzzle in need of a solution. Its multitude of scenes and its proliferation of characters (proliferating both as the investigation widens and as the moral implications of Danny's turning against his own kind increase) comment on and qualify each other but don't build dramatically in the usual way to satisfying explanations.

The characters are enacted quite forcefully, even theatrically (the director Sidney Lumet has a knack for high-octane performances not usually so well contained as here. But their psychology is mainly a matter of flat statements, like the Iawyer's comment on Danny's religious sense of guilt. Equally, the films ambiguity is not a measure of is evasiveness or hypocrisy, but its inclusive, its sharpness about the moral aspects of the situation. Among its sidelights is the suggestion that the lawyers, who originally took Danny's testimony were aware that he was not telling the truth about himself, but suppressed the knowledge (while warning him against perjuring himself on the stand) in their eagerness to press their case.

Out of this multi-faceted view of character and circumstances the film draws its complex study of the policemen's problematic lot. The problem for Danny begins as one of loyalty, whether it is something he owes primarily to his partners and the people with whom he deals (in every sense) in the course of his work, or to a system which first offers him a chance to clear his conscience and then turns against him when expiation leads to self-incrimination. Danny angrily expounds his dilemma near the beginning when he rounds on the two attorneys who have approached him to turn informer. That the film does not become an apologia for a kind of rough justice, meted out by the cop who takes from one junkie in order to give to another, is also a tribute to its critical intelligence. What emerges more is a quizzing of the system by which drugs become a law-enforcement problem, which then becomes a different kind of problem. The film's single flaw, in the end, is that it seems too short.

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Knife in the Table
Prince of the City/John Pym
Sight & Sound
Vol 51 Nos. 1-4
Page 61.
Twenty years ago, Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell and Jason Robards played out, unforgettably, the tragic self-destructive saga of the Tyrone family. The small fact that in remembering the film one first automatically recalls the players is a significant credit to the self-effacing skills of their director, Sidney Lumet. The film transcription of Long Day's Journey into Night was faithful to the letter, it ran its full uncinematic length, each act ended on an eloquent fade, yet it was also decisively unstagebound. Lumet recognised, one imagines, O'Neill's rock solid craft, that an effective transposition called for no tinkering: in long unbroken takes, the players were allowed to run with their lines. The film was a measure of Lumet as interpreter.

Serpico (1973), the story of a cop who stands up to corruption in the New York Police Department only in the end to be beaten down by the freemasonry of his colleagues and forced into retirement in Switzerland, seems on one level to pair naturally with Lumet's new film Prince of the City (Columbia-EMl-Warner), the story of another, cannier cop who exposes corruption in the NYPD but remains, despite the ruin of his life, stoically on the force. However, perhaps because of Lumet's deceptively blank professionalism when dealing with material which chiefly requires simply to be told, the film which seems in a way a more authentic companion piece to Prince of the City is Long Day's Journey. One might add, too, that both these films are marked by a tone of high seriousness - although the former has the odd curlicue which aligns it with the visceral Serpico - and that both bore deep, though from different angles and to different ends, into the inexorable process of 'family' betrayals, the drug addict's pathetic plight, the tragic inevitability of hurting if not actually killing the ones you love.

Prince of the City is Detective Danny Ciello's long day's journey: another confessional outpouring (the film is based on a true story by Robert Daley, and Treat Williams, who plays Danny, spent time with his original, Bob Leuci), another purgatorial ending, and a false catharsis leaving one with the bitter reminder that nothing has really altered. Danny, a leader of one of the police department's Special Investigation Units, is summoned to a meeting with a mild District Attorney working for the Chase (read, Knapp) Commission into police corruption. This brief encounter, at which no pressure is laid, sows a doubt in Danny's conscience and, despite his better instincts, he soon finds himself sealing a Faustian bargain with Cappalino, the DA, and his Ivy League associate Brooks Paige. He agrees to co-operate, but refuses in hopes of preserving his code of conduct to finger his friends and partners. He absolves himself by confessing, with that practised facility for half-truth which, it is suggested, marks the testimony of all policemen, to three misdeeds in his eleven years with the department.

Lumet and his co-screenwriter Jay Presson Allen etch the stages by which Danny, a volatile man who loves his work, partly for the solidarity it breeds, partly for the sense of distanced superiority it engenders (his overview of a corrupt society is, he believes, complete), is forced finally to come to terms with himself, to betray his friends and admit that he himself has committed many of the crimes of which he has accused others. His nemesis comes when, having broken his own code, he finds that he is still considered a reliable witness. In the eyes of the judiciary he has, it seems, been redeemed by his courage. Now an unglamorous police instructor, he faces a class of rookie cops: a streetwise man, his own younger self, enquires if he is the Danny Ciello, and then, when Danny remains silent, stalks out of the presence of a traitor.

Whereas in Long Day's Journey the process of confession was worked out in the course of combative conversations or emerged in long monologues in which ancient duplicities and miserly secrets were finally brought out into the dim light of James Tyrone's summer house, in Prince of the City the duplicities and secrets are prised out of Danny in a series of staccato encounters, which take place in what seem forever like makeshift surroundings, by a series of sleek lawyers. (They are men who have achieved the sort of security that, in different circumstances, James Tyrone might have envied; Danny Ciello, being of a later immigrant generation, has passed envy and can now see these men for what they are - no different from himself, beneath their expensive suits.) New players keep entering the act, Cappalino and Paige pass on to plusher jobs, compelling Danny to reveal a little more. What he fails to recognise, and what the film brilliantly lays out, is that the process of confession, as the Tyrone family all knew, was unstoppable once begun.

Running against this confessional stream is another more conventional but no less well-executed narrative drive (and here one is reminded of the technician who directed The Anderson Tapes): the process by which Danny, nonchalantly wired for sound, entraps the villains who in this film of blurred frontiers, are not quite villains even though they give off whiffs of almost palpable menace. The characters in Prince of the City (and the film is cast with exemplary, unostentatious care) are grouped into professions: each group is composed of individuals who beneath their individuality are in fact the same. The cops look like the mafiosi; the FBI men are all instantly recognisable; the lawyers are united by the cut of their suits. And part of the film's point is that all professions have their laws, their ways of justifying the unjustifiable: in short of making the system, which Leuci through the film-makers suggests is teetering on the brink of anarchy, work for the individual, whatever his aspirations.

Danny Ciello is an actor in some sprawling unscripted drama: his lines are on tapes which have been inefficiently indexed and now, months later, are sometimes indecipherable. Like James Tyrone, he wanted to play the Prince (the film's title is the in this case ironic nickname given Danny and the other elite members of the SlUs); like James Tyrone he ends as a broken secondary player in some unimportant repertory house.

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Prince of the City
US (1981): Crime
Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4
167 min, Rated R, Color
Cast & Credits
Treat Williams - Daniel Ciello
Jerry Orbach - Gus Levy
Richard Foronjy - Joe Marinaro
Don Billett - Bill Mayo
Jenny Marino - Dom Bando
Bob Balaban - Sentimassino
Lindsay Crouse - Carla Ciello
Directed by Sidney Lumet and produced by Burtt Harris. 
Screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Lumet.
Review
He will not rat on his partners. This is his bottom line. He will talk to investigators about all the other guys he knows things about. He will talk about how narcotics cops get involved in the narcotics traffic, how they buy information with drugs, how they string out addicts and use them as informers, how they keep some of the money and some of the drugs after big busts. He will tell what he knows about how the other cops do these things. But he will not talk about his partners in his own unit. This is his code, and, of course, he is going to have to break it.

Prince of the City
US (1981): Crime
Pauline Kael Review
167 min, Rated R, Color
Treat Williams has a very closed face--the kind of opaque face that is like a brick wall in front of the camera. And that may be why Williams, as a New York City police officer who agrees to be wired and to obtain evidence about corruption in his unit, plays each scene as an acting exercise--going through so much teary, spiritual agony that you want to throw something at him. He acts all over the place yet the movie--2 hours and 47 minutes of pseudo-documentary seriousness--is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what's going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends. Things don't begin to come together until you're heading into the third hour, when the cross suspended from Williams' neck lights up, like a balloon above his head, announcing "Penance! Absolution!" There's one remarkable performance (it's mostly in the last section): Jerry Orbach, as the tough-minded cop, Gus Levy, acts with such sureness and economy that while Williams is flailing about Orbach magnetizes the camera. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film has a super-realistic overall gloom, and the people are so "ethnic" and yell so much that you begin to long for the sight of a cool blond in bright sunshine. Lumet and Jay Presson Allen wrote the screenplay, based on the book by Robert Daley about the New York City police officer Bob Leuci. With Lindsay Crouse, who's stuck with one of those speeches about how we're all guilty, Bob Balaban, and Ron Maccone as Nick. The cinematography is by Andrzej Bartkowiak; the music, by Paul Chihara, suggests an existentialist fugue by Schubert. Orion; released by Warners.

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