7.8 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.4 |
An honest New York cop blows the whistle on rampant corruption in the force only to have his comrades turn against him.
Starring: Al Pacino, John Randolph, Jack Kehoe, Biff McGuire, Barbara Eda-YoungDrama | 100% |
Crime | 28% |
Biography | 17% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (Original) (224 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (224 kbps)
French: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (224 kbps)
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Serpico is a biography, a police drama and a morality tale about the high price exacted from someone who refuses to "go along and get along" with a corrupt system. It's also the film that cemented Al Pacino's reputation as a movie star. Whenever someone says that Pacino plays every role the same way, it's obvious they've never seen Serpico, where Pacino richly embodied the troubled and long-suffering cop who blew the whistle on hundreds of his fellow officers, sacrificing his own career, risking his life on a daily basis and ultimately sustaining crippling injuries as a result of his commitment to the ideals he'd sworn to uphold. Pacino monopolizes the screen for over two hours, and much of his performance consists of Frank Serpico's inner turmoil over how to deal with the impossible situation in which he finds himself trapped. Audiences were electrified, and a film that no studio wanted to make became a major hit when it was released in December 1973. Oscar nominations followed for Pacino and for the screen adaptation by Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy) and Norman Wexler (Saturday Night Fever) from the biography by Peter Maas. But the success and artistic endurance of Serpico aren't just a credit to its star. The late Sidney Lumet, who replaced John Avildsen as Serpico's director during pre-production, was a subtle craftsman in the tradition of Billy Wilder. Lumet once declared bluntly: "I hate style that shows." As a result, his achievements were frequently overshadowed by the bold visual experiments of Seventies contemporaries like Spielberg, DePalma, Scorsese and Coppola. Several decades later, with the release of what turned out to be his final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lumet's unobtrusive camera placements and grasp of dramatic rhythm had become so rare that they suddenly seemed revolutionary. Lumet's strengths were rarely displayed to greater advantage than in Serpico, where he framed the tormented cop's struggles against carefully chosen locations of a New York City already sliding toward the financial and social breakdown that would render it synonymous with urban blight for the next twenty years. (The low point was President Gerald Ford's 1975 refusal of a federal bailout, resulting in the famous Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead".) Lumet made it seem that the moral rot against which Serpico was battling had eaten away at the city's very foundation, as if corruption had taken tangible form.
For Serpico, director Lumet reunited with Arthur J. Ornitz, his cinematographer from The Anderson Tapes, who made photographing the crumbling streets of New York something of a specialty in the Seventies with films like Death Wish, Next Stop, Greenwich Village and An Unmarried Woman. In contrast to the energetic, stylized photography displayed in The French Connection just a few years earlier, Lumet and Ornitz framed Serpico's scenes precisely but unobtrusively, so that viewers seem to be casual eyewitnesses to scenes on the street, in offices and precincts or in Frank Serpico's apartment. Warner has delivered an impressive 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Serpico, working from a capable Paramount transfer. There are those in the Blu-ray community who are given to opining on the age of a transfer, based solely on examination of the Blu-ray image. I find that to be an exercise in guesswork, absent information from the studio, which was not available here. I also think it's irrelevant. If an image harvest was capably performed, it doesn't matter whether it was done yesterday or years ago. What matters is how the raw data has been handled since then. The technical crew that processed Serpico has created a film-like image that is detailed and, for a film of this era, as sharp as it can be without the application of electronic enhancements that would change the film's original look. The image has not been subjected to high frequency filtering or other digital processing that leaves obvious artifacts. The color correction accurately reproduces the flat urban palette of browns, rusts and dull grays and blues in the outer boroughs where Serpico spent most of his career. Brighter hues appear occasionally (e.g., at Frank's graduation, or during a lengthy party scene), but nothing in Serpico "pops", nor should it. Everyone has their own idea of what constitutes "demo" material. For many viewers, it's a brightly colored landscape or a special effects extravaganzas. For me, it's the precision with which a disc like Serpico replicates scenes such as Frank's meeting with Bob Blair in the magnificent but deserted Lewisohn Stadium amphitheater, which was demolished shortly after filming, or the scene where Frank's captain abandons him under the Hell Gate Bridge in Queens, two lone figures in the distance. Such scenes are dramatically powerful, and their drama is expressed in visual terms, which is the essence of cinema. Blu-ray brings that content to the home theater in a way that hasn't been seen since Serpico was in theaters. The image has a natural-looking grain pattern that, I suspect, is finer than that of many release prints. Although there was ample additional space on the BD-50, Warner stuck to their usual range of compression, coming out at the high end with an average bitrate of 25.95 Mbps. Certainly the image did not display any artifacts.
Serpico was released in mono, which is available in a two-channel version as Dolby Digital 2.0 (listed as "restored mono") with identical left and right front channels. The default audio track is lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, which contains a very conservative remix of the mono track that retains the front-oriented nature of the mix, but uses the channel separations to give a little more authority and somewhat deeper bass extension to the score by Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek). The score is used sparingly, a point discussed by Lumet in the extras. The soundtrack is dominated by dialogue (which is clear), sound effects and occasional source music.
The extras have been ported over from Paramount's 2002 DVD edition (and appear to be entirely different from those on the Region B-locked Studio Canal disc released in January 2011).
In addition to being a career highpoint for both Pacino and Lumet, Serpico has become one of the essential films of the Seventies, an intense character study of a peculiarly American hero, the lone man of integrity, in the unexpected genre of a police drama. Timing was undoubtedly a factor in the film's popular success. As I recently had reason to reflect in reviewing the new documentary accompanying the reissue of All the President's Men, 1973 was the year when America watched Richard Nixon's Presidency collapse as revelations of illegal and immoral behavior arrived in continuous waves, until it seemed that no institution had been spared from what White House counsel John Dean called "a cancer" on the nation's highest office. Coming off that year, audiences were prepared to cheer the steadfastness of a lone crusader against a corrupt system. Serpico's unyielding commitment to doing the right thing, whatever the cost, still resonates. Highly recommended.
2009
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Limited Edition
1993
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1954
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Un prophète
2009
Extended Director's Cut
1984