Vise Squad

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PRINCE OF THE CITY

Directed by Sidney Lumet

Screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet

He's smart, tough, successful and full of pride. He is, in his early 30s, a member of a New York police elite. The Special Investigating Unit has amassed an impressive record of convictions in major crimes--drug busts, police and other governmental corruption. He is, in the words of an admiring judge, one of the city's princes.

But princes, as everyone long ago learned from the fairy tales, can be turned into frogs. This relentless and terrifying movie is about how the organs of the state--acting in the best interests of society really--can do that to a man. For Danny Ciello (Treat Williams) knows that in enforcing the law, he and his partners have also bent the law. They have supplied confiscated drugs in return for help from junkie informers. Some of the money they have found on arrested dealers has ended up in their pockets. Beyond that, Ciello --whose story is based on that of New York Detective Robert Leuci a decade ago--knows much, much more, mostly about who in law enforcement is on the take. By his own code, Ciello sees himself as honorable: he has never taken a bribe to let a criminal go free or betrayed his detective partners. But his sins of commission and omission nag at him, and when an insinuating investigator from what eventually becomes a special commission on police corruption begins working, on his guilts, he agrees to become an undercover operative. His only condition is that he not be required to inform on his best friends, the men on his team.

Ciello-Leuci is a man who feels fully alive only when he is at high risk--when, say, wired for sound he collects evidence from Mafiosi about cops they have suborned. But this movie is a moral, not a criminal, investigation. The people he works for have cases to break, headlines to make, careers at stake. They need to squeeze every drop of usefulness out of him; he needs to defend his honor by refusing to rat on his friends. By the end he has gently been led to the most terrible betrayals of self, friends and family who must now live under guard and threat of death. And so slowly, undramatically, have the jaws of the vise closed on him it is impossible to say when they started to draw blood.

One of this movie's strengths is that it passes no judgment on the relative merits of Leuci's code and the more impersonal workings of the criminal code. Nor does it speculate on motives. It merely presents the behavior of people under pressure and causes the viewer to wonder whether anyone would have done better in similar circumstances.

Lumet has often been able to elicit electrifying performances from his lead actors, and here Treat Williams joins the likes of Al Pacino in Serpico and Peter Finch in Network. But Lumet is just as skilled at finding, among little-known or even unprofessional actors, those faces that taken together compose a vision--grotesque, but never inhuman--of the urban landscape.

Prince of the City is a very long film--close to three hours--but not a frame of it could be dispensed with. The movie torments precisely because it so painfully details its protagonist's slow, unaware descent into a nightmare of moral ambiguity that is indistinguishable from madness. Or hell.

--By Richard Schickel

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