wilsonstuart-32346 Coming in at thee hours,Prince of The City must rate as one of the longest films I've seen; and it's certainly one of the best New York cop thrillers out; maybe one of the best cop thrillers, period. Sidney Lumet picks up and develops from the earlier themes he started with Al Pacino in Serpico - although the moral certainties displayed in that film are noticeably absent here.Based on Robert Daley's novel of the same name, and the experiences of cop turned crime novelist - lecturer the late Bob Leuci, Prince of The City makes compelling viewing. Detective Danny Ciello of NYPD's Special Investigation Unit - specialising in narcotics and organised crime; working city wide with no external supervision, one character notes, starts to experience a series of qualms about the more ''unorthodox' aspects of his work. After a couple of false starts, he agrees to cooperate with a federal commission, under the illusion he can pick and choose his targets and keep his partners in the clear.He soon finds that much more will be expected of him and that his new colleagues are neither reliable or trustworthy.Treat Williams puts in a first class performance as the increasingly tormented Ciello, the late Jerry Orbach is a powerhouse as the partner (one of several) he will betray. Danny's decisions have tragic implications for his family, colleagues and associates. Yet his hands are not clean - sooner or later he will have to face the consequences of some earlier actions....despite his less than truthful accounts.Prince of The City protrays the problems of policing a big city, perhaps any big city, with a gritty realism that most police procedurals only dream about - perhaps rivalled only by The French Connection. It's a having an exhaust journey into man's descent into a foggy morass of grey morality, where nothing is what it appears...and the uncertain redemption that follows.

breakdownthatfilm-blogspot-com Everybody has something to hide. We all have secrets we don't want anyone to know about. Its personal information that is only given out to the most trusted of people - mainly close family and friends. But there's a difference when that secret crosses the line on ethics and morals. When it comes to this, people lie, and lying is never a good thing. The act of lying will always catch up somewhere and somehow. Everyone has a conscious, it's the device that let's the person know what they're doing wrong. And if the individual cannot justify to themselves why the secret they're keeping is for the right reason, their conscious will eat them alive. Almost like a self-destruct button. Some can repress this feeling while many others crack under pressure.This reflects on the story of Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), a New York cop who joined the force to make a difference and be a good person for society. However, it's not until he's is asked by a commission of investigators to spy on the system that he works at for possible corruption. Originally, Ciello is skeptical about the matter because he doesn't want to stab his fellow cops in the back, but he is convinced otherwise. And to his dismay, the longer he stayed in the business, the scarier the information became. Thus leading to an investigation brought onto himself.This kind of plot is very serious in nature because of how it focuses on morals and how people with even the kindest of hearts can fall. This is also the kind of drama that audiences should have the patience to sit through. The running time is almost three hours long because it carefully follows the path of the human struggle between knowing what is the right and wrong thing to do when it comes to telling the truth. The length may annoy some but the story should be powerful enough to keep people focused. And the writing not only covers the story of one man, but several people involved with the lies and how they deal with the stress they induce on themselves. Family life is also included although by the finale the closure isn't as strong as the rest. That also may upset some.The cast is very large in this movie. Treat Williams as the main character gives a memorable performance as the troubled cop. His reactions to many situations closely resemble to how anyone would react if they were in his shoes. It's a very human performance. Even a very young Lance Henriksen has a number of his own scenes. There's also a character named Gus Levy played by Jerry Obach, he would later voice Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast (1991) ten years later. Cool. Although the rating is R, it's more for language and a few beatings nothing gruesome or over the top.The music composed by Paul Chihara is unique too. It's certainly one the most absent of scores I've ever heard but it also helps make the story feel more realistic. This is one of the few times where the music doesn't need to be present to give emotion because the actors themselves give a lot as it is already. There is also a main theme, which is carried out by a saxophone that is good. But the one thing I liked most about this movie was how audience should feel at the end credits. In a court trial, no matter if one walks away guilty or innocent, the past will always be there to haunt them. People will always remember the bad and never your good deeds. And from that day on, the individual must constantly fight to uphold the respect they lost. That's the human struggle and it can be so terrifying. It's a movie that should been seen and understood at least once.The acting led by Treat Williams is very good. Its running time may be lengthy but its story richly consists of powerful emotions and life lessons that demand to be seen just for that.

jzappa "The law doesn't know the streets." But that doesn't mean that blurring the lines of the law is necessarily a good thing. Many law officials criticized this film during its release, perceiving it as glorifying its corrupt cops and vilifying the prosecutors who toiled to convict them. That is not what the film does. There are no black and white hats here. The story divides its characters into two sides, yes, but they are all struggling throughout to assert a concrete ideology within the oceanic gray area that is the law, and the good and evil it represents.The axis of the film is that Danny Ciello will not inform on his partners. Outside of his wife and kids, who know them like uncles, they are the only people who care about him. He will make the deal to talk about the involvement of narcotics in the corrupt activities of other cops, but not his dear and implicitly loyal friends. As we watch this movie, it is about narcs and New York City crime, but Sidney Lumet wants the underpinnings to be just as visible, how in a corrupt world, one cannot go straight without burning cherished bridges.Lumet gets to the heart of the war on drugs. And we see how it is, was, and will continue to be an utter failure. Addicts depend on the drug. Police depend on the continuation of the trade to uphold their status, and if not their status, their basic living condition. They know that if addicts are going to cooperate with them, they need their drugs. They know that if the courts are going to cooperate with them, drugs must be confiscated and accounted for. They know why they became cops, but they also know more than anyone else on their theoretical side of the law how miserable life is for a junkie. This is a lonely, dangerous and thankless dichotomy of a 24-7 job that's never finished, and if they want to skim a little drug money, that's their way of making it feel more worthwhile.Because Danny Ciello, based on New York cop Bob Leuci, who cooperated in a 1971 internal affairs investigation, is such a demanding and grueling role, almost always on screen in stressful, tiresome and emotional situations, I spent a good deal of the movie having trouble with the casting of Treat Williams. He was a no-name at the time, and that is what Lumet wanted, but there is something incongruously theatrical about Williams that is inconsistent with the rest of the actors. But he does convince us in the latter half of the film that he is falling to bits on account of his job, his testimony and the inextricable fate of the two that he will eventually have no choice but to rat on his friends.Prince of the City is a crime film, about cops, drug dealing, set in New York, and Lumet captures the gritty NYC streets of the 1970s that he encapsulated in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon as if the era had never left. But it's not a violent film at all. There are many characters, hardly any of whom we really get to know beyond their legal and moral standpoints in the story. There is a later scene wherein a meeting of prosecutors debate whether or not a charge of perjury is justified. Its ethical issues are passionate and effective to us, but the verdict is a coin toss in the political climate. The movie answers none of the gray questions posed. It only threatens with possible scenarios.

rhinocerosfive-1 Pletchner from REPO MAN sticking his head through a window pane during the Columbians' bust; the chair collapse in the IA office; Orbach roughing up the state's attorney; the junkie chase in the rain; accidentally handing a receipt from the DA's office to the crooked bondsman - these are dynamite scenes equal to some of Lumet's best work. The supporting cast and occasional gritty dialog are Lumet hallmarks. The camera's always in the right place, the city looks dirty, the cops look like hoods, the hoods look like cops, all's well in the looks department.But this movie is 2 hours too long at 3 hours, and Treat Williams, though decked out in a series of wonderful coats, gives an atypically uneven performance. The Lumet-Jay Allen script also is terribly imbalanced, burying Williams under awful expositional speeches. Depthful insight is sacrificed to an epic, shallow and ultimately trite style. Lumet got the best out of Chayefsky and Waldo Salt and Mamet, and Pacino and Steiger and Dan O'Herlihy and a lot of people, and he is among the best directors in terms of camera movement and B&W lighting; but he also made THE WIZ, THE ANDERSON TAPES, and GUILTY AS SIN. He once said that the best work comes from preparing for the miracle to happen. Sometimes it doesn't happen. It happened several times on this set, but if you're going to write this many monologues your name better be Shakespeare; and if you're going to direct this many monologues, your name better be something other than Sidney Lumet. (for other Lumet monologue embarrassments, see Sean Connery's drunken confession in THE OFFENCE.)