- Officer Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is a man determined to carve his own path through life. He's a plainclothes policeman with a mustache and long hair who goes by the nickname "Paco." He randomly buys himself a $5 puppy off the street and, at some point, also comes into possession of a parrot and a mouse. At work, he reads obscure literature and insists on checking all ten fingers in the fingerprint database. In his free time, he gardens and hits on most of the women he encounters. People who meet him at parties ask if he's really a cop, and it's easy to understand why.
- One might posit that it's Serpico's non-conformist nature that gets him into trouble with his fellow officers. At first, it's little things like wanting to order his own lunch instead of letting a deli owner treat him to a free bowl of soup. Later, it's the act of buying a suspect a cup of coffee instead of beating a confession out of him. It certainly doesn't help that Serpico wants credit for the arrests he's earned, even if standard operating procedure would attribute them to his pencil-pushing superiors. Eventually, he transfers to another division after his ballet dancing doesn't sit well with one especially gruff lieutenant (James Tolkan). There, bags of cash are handed to him without explanation, but with plenty of implicit strings attached. Another transfer lands him in a division where his psychotic partner (Norman Ornellas) drives the wrong way down a street to rob a bookie. It seems like things are getting worse instead of better.
- The other cops, led by his onetime friend Tom Keough (Jack Kehoe), eventually confront Serpico about his conspicuous honesty. After all, "who can trust a cop who don't take money?" Things finally come to a head when Serpico arrests a loan shark (Richard Foronjy) who is so cozy with the police that Serpico has to personally shove him into a jail cell since none of his colleagues can be trusted to do so. It seems like Serpico's only allies in the war against corruption are fellow honest cop Bob Blair (Tony Roberts) and the indomitable Captain Green (John Randolph), the latter of whom adds a helpful shot in the arm to the film's final third. As the spectre of testimony looms, cops keep reminding Serpico that "we wash our own laundry," to which he replies that, no, actually "it just gets dirtier."
- Director Sidney Lumet had a special gift for identifying great humanitarian stories that resonate with audiences in any era, and Serpico is no exception to that rule. At the film's start, I half agreed with the corrupt cops in thinking that Serpico was too oddball and high-strung to be a police officer. By the end, I was convinced that he was one of only three honest cops in the entire city of New York. While I expect some of the details of Serpico's life have been embellished and adjusted for dramatic purposes, the film is to be commended for not trying to paint over Serpico's many faults, several of which lead to the departure of various girlfriends (Barbara Eda-Young, Cornelia Sharpe) over the years. Throw in some terrific location filming depicting New York at the apex of its scumminess, and you have a film that is unfortunately far more believable than any honest person would want.
- There are some great cameos from M. Emmet Walsh, F. Murray Abraham, Judd Hirsch, Tracey Walter, and Tom Signorelli.
- Based on Peter Maas' biography of the real Frank Serpico.
