PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet

SCREENWRITER: Jay Presson Allen, Sidney Lumet

FILM STARS: Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Lindsay Crouse, Cynthia Nixon, Lance Henriksen, Alan King.

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Robert Daley

TYPE: Non Fiction Novel

PUBLISHER: Granada

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1980

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1978

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: Prince of the City: The True Story of a Cop Who Knew Too Much

NOTES

GENRE: Crime

WORDS: I saw the film when it first came out, and loved it. Director Sidney Lumet could do no wrong it seemed. The more I saw of his films I realised he could. But, even his failures are watchable. This film, is much like his 1973 film with Al Pacino, “Serpico”, also set in NYC (has many Lumet films), deals with cops, corruption and a police officer breaking the police code of silence in NYC.  Both are based on true stories  and both follow similar story arcs, though at the time of this film Lumet said he felt guilty about the two-dimensional way he had treated cops in “Serpico” and said that “Prince of the City” was his way to rectify this depiction.

The earlier film was a critical and commercial success, but “Prince of the City” wasn’t. Some complained of Treat Williams’ lack of star power compared to Pacino but Williams does well. I think the films length (167minutes) on what is a crime drama may have been a problem though that never stopped Scorsese or even “Serpico” which ran 130 mins. Perhaps, after all the 1970s NYC cop films, and the real life investigations, people were weary of the same. It’s a pity as it is a fine film. It plays like a documentary with live actors s0 perhaps it’s a good example of a late 1940s police procedural docu-drama updated.

Author Daley was a former New York Deputy Police Commissioner for Public Affairs turned writer who here wrote about the police life of Robert Leuci, an NYPD detective whose testimony and secret tape recordings helped indict 52 members of the Special Investigation Unit and convict them of income tax evasion. Though this is reportage Daley is also a novelist so the book does read like a novel.

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