FILM

...But it would be a mistake to regard Prince of the City as merely part of a trend, playing one of the variations of "I hate New York...

...Hollywood would not make such a film (although fifty-eight Heartlands could be produced for the price of one Heaven's Gate), and independent filmmakers only manage to do so with the help of public funding...

...The screenplay focuses on the life of Elinore (Conchata Ferrell), an impoverished Denver widow with a young daughter, from the time of her arrival in Wyoming as housekeeper for Clyde (Rip Torn), a dour Scottish rancher...

...But none of these scenes appears extraneous, and the film, despite its length, impresses with its narrative economy...

...And now we have Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, which takes us back to the fearful 1970s and plunges us once more into the bottomless pit of New York's civic corruption...

...Heartland is based on the real-life experiences of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Clyde Stewart, homesteaders in the Burntfork area of Wyoming prior to World War I, as recounted in two books that Elinore wrote...

...I am aware of no objective justification for this renewed depiction of New York as America's prime locus sce-leris, but I suspect that the contributors to this current trend are simply exploiting what has become a persistent popular myth...

...The film's credibility comes in part from Lumet's refusal to arouse the viewer with cinematic sensationalism, despite the fact that his material is rather sensational...

...Although he naively believes himself to be in control of the situation, the investigation, prodded by ambitious and politically motivated prosecutors, soon takes on a life of its own...

...Lumet has fashioned a gripping and complex crime film which relies for its principal effects neither on spectacle (there are no elaborate set pieces), nor on splashy special effects, nor even on suggestions of lurking urban horror...

...In films of the past year, however, New York is again depicted as the ultimate hell hole (Escape from New York), an irremediable sink of corruption (Cruising and Fort Apache, The Bronx), and a metaphor for the decline of western civilization (Wolfen...

...T-shirts and television screens proclaimed "I love New York," and such movies as Manhattan, An Unmarried Woman, Kramer vs...

...As a domestic servant in the city she faces a prospect of continued toil without ever having anything which she could call her own...

...And Treat Williams (who actually looks much like the real-life Bob Leuci) gives a more than adequate performance in his demanding role...

...Nor does this film reduce the entangled issues it explores to a simplistic conflict between good guys and bad guys...

...Dubbed the city's "princes" by a New York jurist, the SIU detectives operated with virtual autonomy, comported themselves like police superstars (dressing flamboyantly and celebrating their busts at expensive restaurants), and became the envy of other city cops...

...When first asked by a Commission investigator whether he knows anything about police corruption, Leuci-Ciello is testy and defensive...

...This rare exposition of the stuff and substance of day-to-day living under the harshest conditions is moving...

...This was the image of New York City that held sway in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when reports of crime, riots, violence, dope, filth, and urban decay led to a widespread belief that the city was going down the tubes...

...At the time of the Knapp Commission investigations into corruption in New York's criminal justice system, the relatively young Leuci led a team assigned to the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), an elite corps of detectives charged with cracking the city's dope rings...

...Perhaps my fascination stems from the fact that the movie gives dramatic life and substance to an aspect of contemporary metropolitan life that I ordinarily encounter only in the headlines...

...New York, appropriately, is represented here neither as a stage for contemporary urban horror nor as a benign cultural playground for young professionals and Woody Allen types...

...There is no sex and relatively little on-screen violence (the violence is largely psychological and moral...

...It is a work of independent regional filmmaking, the first fruit of an idea hatched by two Montana women—Annick Smith (executive producer) and Beth Ferris (co-producer and scenarist)—for a series of dramatic films on the lives of women pioneers on the western frontiers...

...Moreover, the film enjoys especially felicitous casting in the many supporting and minor roles (there are 126 speaking parts in all...

...It looks and feels, in other words, much like the dynamic, complex, perpetually problem-ridden city in which I live and work...

...But an economic revival and an effective public relations campaign in the late 1970s succeeded in replacing the image of Babylon-on-the-Hudson with that of "Fun City...

...And that's as it should be in a film of such realistic intent...

...In the daily course of my life I have no direct contact with the world of cops, junkies, pushers, mafiosi, prosecutors, and the criminal courts...

...I wanted to try and make a different kind of western," Pearce has stated, "a truer kind of western, one that would be about struggle and isolation and real economic work, where the simplest things— things that films so often take for granted or make seem easy—would sometimes be the most difficult and hard won...

...But he is increasingly troubled...

...He had initially joined the police force to fight on the side of the good guys...

...The film's subject is thus not the legendary cowboy or bandit, but the bit players one barely notices in the background of most western movies...

...He develops a relationship with the investigator, and eventually agrees to go underground for the Commission—wearing a wire, and collecting evidence which he hopes will lead to indictments against the crooked bail bond agents, lawyers, and judges whom he believes to be largely responsible for keeping the big drug pushers on the streets...

...So much for the "prince...

...what, finally, of the city...

...Prince of the City, based on Bob Daley's book of the same title, is the true story of Bob Leuci (called Danny Ciello in the film, played by Treat Williams), a New York detective in the Narcotics Divison...

...This is the realistic representation of a world where, as Jean Renoir suggested in another context, the terrible thing is that "everyone has his reasons...

...The awful things often associated with New York are just as likely to be found in Wilmington, Denver, or Galveston, but none of those places has so firm a hold on the popular imagination...

...He insists on one condition, and it is accepted: He will never gather evidence or testify against his friends and partners...

...And its director, Richard Pearce (best known as a maker of political documentaries and as cinematographer for the award-winning Vietnam war film Hearts and Minds), had never before made a feature film...

...Prince is a big and richly textured work and a long one, with some 280 individual scenes and a running-time of almost three hours...

...I'm not at all sure why I find Prince of the City so engrossing...

...But she is tough and resourceful, and though driven almost to despair by the rigors and isolation of frontier living, she manages not only to survive but to build with Clyde (whom she eventually marries) a life of renewed sense of purpose and self-esteem...

...Shooting took place in 130 locations in all of the city's five boroughs, and the result is an impression of variety and vitality...

...Heartland is one of the best films I have seen this year, and a work of which the National Endowment for the Humanities (and the taxpayers who fund it) can be justly proud...

...he no longer sleeps well at night...

...And much of Heartland, accordingly, depicts acts not of great bravado, but of ordinary frontier life: cooking, washing and hanging clothes, plowing, the roundup, branding, milking, slaughtering pigs, chopping wood, pitching hay, chopping ice, hauling water, ironing...

...Kramer, and Willy & Phil represented the city as an appealing urban playground...

...Although it was also made in a realistic mode, Heartland is quite a different sort of movie...

...The filmmakers obtained further documentation (anecdotes, photos, letters) from the surviving Stewart children...

...The film was largely funded by a $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I believe is the largest award the agency has ever given for the making of a single film...

...It is also a fine case for opposing the severe budget cuts the Reagan Administration proposes for the National Endowment...

...He does not, like Al Pacino (as Frank Serpico, in Lumet's earlier work on police corruption) have the commanding presence which brings a mythic dimension to a performance, but he makes a credible cop...

...He has come to operate, however, in a manner not dissimilar to that of the criminals he is pledged to combat...