Screen

...Danny is motivated by a kind of hubris, a desire to expose himself to danger coupled with a foolish belief that he could protect himself and his partners at S.I.U...

...The truth is also that the Justice Department - the idealistic young prosecutors and puritanical, upper-middle-class graduates of Harvard Law - has beguiled and exploited Danny as surely as he did the junkies whom he used as informers by supplying them with heroin...

...Only by such a drastic measure, it is now believed, could the cycle of corruption at the schools possibly be broken...

...The truth is that the cops could not catch anybody, let alone make the mass assaults on narcotics traffic S.I.U...

...The plan contains a kind of despair about our institutions, a feeling that they are, finally, beyond reform - that they are hopeless...

...yet no one is finally found either innocent or guilty...

...Yet even the most hard-nosed and merciless of these lawyers, the one who wants to turn around and prosecute Danny once he's no longer useful, is also seen to have his decent reasons, his code, his own, terrible nobility...

...Danny eventually merges into the mass of resignations, break-downs, suicides, and near-suicides that he causes among the ranks at S.I.U...

...Sidney Lumet's new movie, Prince of the City, seems to have been made under a similar cloud...

...achieves, unless cops ingratiated themselves with junkies, pushers, gangsters - the very people they are trying to eliminate...

...This is why Lumet's story becomes so long and involves ever greater numbers of characters...

...The film is based on the true story of a police detective who became the star witness for the Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption in New York about a decade ago...

...He is caught, along with all the rest, in the inexorable contradictions of the institutions he seeks to reform...

...There are scores of speaking parts in this film whose story takes Lumet upwards of three hours to tell...

...But in Prince of the City, there is a kind of failure of liberal nerve that is at once both depressing and poignant...

...On the other hand, Danny's tragedy, if that's what it is, is not being singled out by fate, but swallowed up by it...

...from implication...

...Even the most energetic of liberals, the most committed true believer, has to throw up his hands and says, as one of the characters in Dickens's Hard Times repeatedly does, "Aw's a muddle...

...The tragedy is not ultimately his alone, but the system's...

...The reason for the length lies not only in the complexity of the case, but in Lumet's readiness to let the story lead him wherever it will...

...Many criminals are caught, and many cops corrupted...

...Despite the reference the film's title makes to the detective, who is here called Danny and played by Treat Williams, the story leads increasingly beyond him and indeed beyond any single individual...

...Danny is a member of the Special Investigations Unit, the "princes of the city," as the detectives in the unit were, called both because of their legendary success making drug busts and the impunity with which they themselves operated...

...The more Lumet probes his characters, the more human each of them becomes, and the more untenable classic liberalism becomes as well...

...In a twenty-year series of films from Twelve Angry Men through Serpico and Dog-Day Afternoon, Lumet was always the classic New York liberal...

...The checks, and balances become a stand-off, a paralysis whereby every one is individually in the right and all have, collectively, gone wrong...

...In the end, Lumet feels compelled to give everyone his day in court...

...Little by little, the spirit of reform, optimism, becomes impossible...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.N L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...That might have been a better title', or at least a less ironic one, for Prince of the City...

...Screen AMERICAN TRAGEDY MUDDLE-AGED LIBERALISM THERE are a couple of high schools in Harlem where delinquency is so rampant and ineradicable that the City of New York is thinking of closing them down completely for a few years...

...Danny' s story is lost in the shuffle of innumerable other ruined careers, of conflicts of interest and of values...

...On the one hand, "prince" is a term appropriate to the adaptation of Robert Daley's book done by Lumet and Jay Presson Allen, for all concerned think of the story as a tragedy...

...Only after the current student body had all passed through and graduated, leaving these schools entirely vacant, would they be started up again...

...There is no solution, no way out of the dilemma...

...In the process, there is inevitably a tradeoff...