Serpico is a 1973 American neo-noir biographical crime film directed by Sidney Lumet, and starring Al Pacino. Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler wrote the screenplay, adapting Peter Maas’s biography of NYPD officer Frank Serpico, who went undercover to expose corruption in the police force. Both Maas’s book and the film cover 12 years, 1960 to 1972. The film and principals were nominated for numerous awards, earning recognition for its score, direction, screenplay, and Pacino’s performance. The film was also a commercial success.
Frank Serpico begins his career with the NYPD as an idealistic rookie who believes in the moral value of policing. He has a simple and old-fashioned ethical code, an outlook which used to be known as honesty. What he finds is a moral sewer, five boroughs wide, in which almost every cop is on the take. The police are just another gang of hoodlums, but with more guns than the bad guys. Even basically decent cops go along with the kickback culture, because a locker-room psychology prevails in which values have become perverted. Squad loyalty is now a criminal conspiracy of silence. Detectives do not hesitate to shake-down hoods who are slow to pay. To Frank Serpico, this is simply wrong. He wants no part of it. And so his long agony begins.
We see the hero develop from a naive rookie who refuses even to accept free meals from restaurateurs on his beat, through a period as a hot-dog undercover man, into his lonely crusade against the NYPD. Pacino interestingly makes Serpico a misfit, his inability to sustain relationships and semi-vigilante street tactics suggesting that sheer bloody mindedness might have as much to do with his stand as idealism. Finally, the hero is an isolated, broken man who retires to Switzerland with his only faithful friend, an equally shaggy dog. It’s no great victory, but it is great.