Lumet and Pacino – Serpico and A Dog Day Afternoon

Despite once being sixteen and revelling in all things East Coast, gangster and Italian, I had never seen two of Al Pacino’s classic films: Serpico and A Dog Day Afternoon. So, in an attempt to appreciate two of the defining works of the late, great Sidney Lumet, I watched them both back to back. While both movies, in many ways, chart similar preoccupations of the director, they are actually very different beasts. Most obviously, genre-wise, Serpico is a curious blend of cop film and biopic, whereas A Dog Day Afternoon is very much a heist movie. However, neither of them is straight down the line.

The trademark social realism of Lumet is obvious from the very first minutes of Serpico; his New York has none of the glossy sheen of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Woody Allen. What it does have is full-frontal nudity and rapes, chockablock as it is with hoodlums and vagrants. The film recounts the true-life story of New York cop Frank Serpico, an odd, honest officer infatuated with counter-culture who testified against police corruption in the NYPD. Covering a period of roughly twelve years, from Serpico’s graduation up till just after he is shot on the face on the job, the main signifiers of the passage of time are his shaggy dog and even shaggier facial hair.

I did enjoy the film and its unique combination of Greenwich Village hippy-dom and gritty urban policing, yet I also felt it didn’t quite satisfy me on either front. Initially captivating, the film loses its way slightly in the second half, where the testimony scenes are never as tense as they might have been. Even the much-lauded performance by Pacino wasn’t quite as awesome as I had expected – it was released a year after his outstanding turn as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part One, for God’s sake.

Not as much of a classic as people have made out, Serpico is a solid, interesting portrait of an outsider – with an incredible wardrobe. A Dog Day Afternoon, on the other hand, is definitely a classic. Once more a portrayal of a pariah, it ticks all the boxes that Serpico failed to. For example, the increased back-story we get in A Dog Day helps us to empathise more with Pacino’s Sonny more and the heist-movie twists genuinely make him a more complex and surprising character.

The bungled bank job that form the film’s core show’s Sunny to be a trapped, frustrated outsider, with Sal the Lennie to his George. Pacino is fantastic in the role: a perfect example of brooding brilliance and method acting that truly convinces. Again, the movie deals uncomfortable 70s themes – in this case homosexuality and trans-gender issues – whilst remaining tense and surprising. It also has interesting things to say about TV, news reporting, celebrity and entertainment. In that and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lumet really did craft two of the best films in that genre. Just don’t believe the hype about Serpico.