blog 13 rough draft

The film Serpico certainly does show New York City in its “true colors”. This is no doubt due to the fact that it was filmed in various locations throughout the five boroughs, but it’s mainly due to the fact that it’s based on the true story of Frank Serpico. The director of the film Sidney Lumet was able to successfully reenact Serpico’s story because it was shot only two years after the films main plot has happened. Serpico was able to capture the real culture of people partying and the major issue to tarnish New York City which was police corruption.

The movie Serpico was filmed in the year 1973. It wasn’t a real big hit in terms of box office sales, as it only managed to gross $29,800,000 domestically (boxofficemojo.com). it stars Al Pacino as the main character of NYPD officer Frank Serpico. The film’s opening scene is of Frank Serpico in the back of a police car bleeding from a gunshot wound to the face. He is being taken to the greenpoint hospital in Brooklyn. When the doctors start performing surgery on him is when the movie goes into a flashback of his life leading up to this tragic event. Frank Serpico is now seen in the graduation ceremony for the NYPd. He is now assigned to patrol for the 81^st police precinct in brooklyn. Frank Serpico is very naïve in believing that cops are all honest. His first encounter showing him otherwise is when he’s introduced to the deli owner where he and his partner patrol. Serpico is offered a free soup, but instead asks for a sandwich. This in turn gets the deli owner upset and he proceeds to give Serpico the worst sandwich he has ever seen. Serpico’s partner quickly calms him down because they only get free food due to the fact that they let the deli owner get away with being double parked when he is handling deliveries. The main focus of the movie is when Frank Serpico receives an unmarked envelope from a fellow police officer which contains $300 inside. This prompts Serpico to report the incident to higher officials. While he acted very honest, this act also made Frank Serpico an outsider among the rest of the police officers who were taking illegal money from people. Serpico being socially different didn’t help his cause neither, he always wore nontraditional police attire and seemed to embrace the 1970’s. Due to constant harassment Serpico eventually had to get transferred out of the 81^st precinct and go into the plain clothes division of a precinct in The Bronx. It wasn’t long before Serpico would realize that the corruption wasn’t just going on in his old precinct, but that it was a problem throughout the police force. Frank Serpico was often offered a lot of illegal money from his fellow police officers but as usual never accepted it. The vicious cycle of not being trusted and mistreated started to occur in the new precinct as well. Due to his co-operation with higher city officials trying to stop the police corruption Frank Serpico was very much disliked. Serpicoo was set-up one day by his fellow police officers, they went to make a drug bust and as Srpico tried to force himself into the apartment his partners didn’t help and that resulted in him being shot point blank in the face.