On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen PLAYING BOTH SIDES OF THE LAW by robert asahina Prince of the City is what critics like to call an "important" film. It has a socially significant theme (police corruption) that is...
...Admittedly, Leuci's turning informant has never been satisfactorily explained...
...Though it lacks artistry and often intelligence, Prince of the City at least exhibits a certain integrity...
...Kasdan calls himself a writer...
...Danny believes he can inform on the rest of the SIU without implicating himself or his immediate partners...
...the movie appears to ask...
...Body Heat also has six or seven endings-i forget how many...
...if they hadn't occasionally resorted to unorthodox and technically illegal procedures, we seem to be told, they never could have done their job...
...The same cannot be said of Body Heat, which strikes me as an incompetent and sleazy piece of work...
...The story raises some interesting questions about law-enforcement means and ends...
...Prince of the City does paint a nightmarish amoral landscape where friend and enemy, betrayer and betrayed manipulate each other to save their own skins...
...In the first contact he has with the Commission, he is uncooperative...
...regular moviegoers are on their own...
...As for that old girlfriend who had popped up for no apparent reason early on, well now it seems there was a reason after all...
...The rest of the cast are mostly stick figures: a prosecutor here, a crooked cop there...
...After much hot air and a number of double-and triple-crosses, Ned finds out what a sucker he's been and has to take the rap for the murder, while Matty gets away scot-free...
...Everyone's emotions are aflame...
...It is as a drama that the movie-not meant to be a documentary -has enormous problems...
...The film was adapted by Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, who also directed, from Robert Daley's book of the same title about a real New York City policeman named Robert Leuci...
...In case you don't get it, Kasdan even has one of the characters helpfully gloss at the beginning of the film, "When it gets hot, people kill each other...
...It is further charged that the prosecutors are unsym-pathetically drawn as unfeeling enforcers of laws that have little relevance to the reality of police work on the streets...
...Nobody seems to have airconditioning, except the local coffee shop, where it doesn't work anyway...
...Attached to the elite Special Investigations Unit (SIU), whose members were nicknamed "princes of the city" because of their wide discretionary powers in narcotics cases, Leuci worked with the Knapp Commission and other such agencies to uncover departmental corruption during the early '70s...
...As long as they catch the "bigger fish," we should not object...
...Everybody walks around sweating indoors and crabbing about the heat...
...Chief among these is Danny's unaccounted-for motivation...
...Former members of the Knapp Commission and crime reporters have attacked Lumet and Allen for their perspective on these issues...
...Partly as a result of Leuci's cooperation, 52 of its 70 men were indicted, two committed suicide, and one went mad...
...Kasdan was apparently so determined to write an up-to-date hommage to the film noirs of the '40s that he never stopped to consider how some aspects of our daily life might be different in the '80s...
...It is as if Lumet and Allen thought they could disguise the film's flaws by multiplying the characters...
...It is very long (nearly three hours...
...You see, the action takes place in the summer in Florida, and the film begins with a fire, and Edmund's body is destroyed in a fire, and Matty tells Ned, "I'm burning up...
...Following his more than two hours of bluster and bravado, Williams delivers the lines with a high, light, falsely normal voice, making it clear how the world has come crashing down on him...
...Even Danny's partners seem cut out of one cardboard...
...Taking things to a literal-minded extreme is the least of Kasdan's problems...
...in the second, he is railing against the investigators' political ambitions...
...And it has been the center of much controversy...
...The key moral question facing Danny that provides all the tension-whether or not to cooperate with the investigation-is resolved in the first 25 minutes of the film...
...Danny sells out everybody, including himself, and ultimately cries in anguish: "I feel like I'm lying even when I'm telling the truth I don't know what the truth is anymore...
...Moreover, in interviews and on talk shows he has been self-righteously condemning the ill-treatment he and his colleagues receive in Hollywood...
...the few scenes of Danny at home lack sufficient texture todo what is being asked of them...
...Was the SIU justified, for example, in giving narcotics to its informants in exchange for their help in nailing the higher-up dealers...
...Another serious defect is the poorly structured plot...
...She's poison," the police chief says of Matty to Ned...
...Williams is distinctive as Ciello because he looks at least 10 years younger than the next youngest member of the cast...
...then she doesn't...
...There is some truth to these accusations...
...But they keep getting delivered with straight faces...
...Danny insists, "You got to treat us different...
...The film grinds to its depressing conclusion inexorably once the choice is made...
...Although the film-makersacknowledgethatthesix policemen are not completely "clean," they focus on SIU camaraderie so frequently and compassionately that the officers seem martyrs to their own sense of duty, to their mission of wiping out the New York drug trade by any means...
...After that there are no real ethical or dramatic conflicts...
...But the plotting and counter plotting soon become so tangled that it is impossible to tell anyone apart without a score-card...
...One complaint is that the SIU miscreants are, for the most part, warmly characterized as dedicated policemen virtually handcuffed by their superiors and the courts...
...Perhaps Kasdan thinks people actually talk like the hard-boiled types in pulp fiction...
...Just when you think everything's wrapped up, Kasdan sticks on another ad hoc explanation to add to the confusion: First Matty dies...
...Directed and written by Lawrence Kasdan (author of the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark), the film is basically a variation on the themes of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity...
...Yet had Body Heat been set 40 years ago, the obviousness of the title metaphor would still have been, to put it gently, annoying...
...Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), the fictional counterpart of Leuci, is indeed rendered in a glowing light, as are his five partners...
...The net effect, unfortunately, is a movie that is complicated at best and confusing at worst-without ever touching upon the complexities of Robert Leuci's story...
...Countless similar-sounding names are thrown at the viewer, and the actors they belong to all seem to be dark-haired, burly types with five o'clock shadows...
...Most important, detractors maintain that the corruption involved far graver crimes and was much more widespread than Prince of the City indicates...
...The result is a bewilderment I haven't felt since trying to make sense of Godfather II...
...I at least had one, in the form of a publicity release...
...I'm bad," Matty admits...
...There is, to be sure, some grim fascination in watching the prosecutors spin the complicated web of promises and threats that entice and coerce Danny into "turning...
...We don't know whether he was driven by guilt over all the corruption he was party to, or by the desire to make a deal before he got caught himself...
...Were the anti-corruption investigators acting responsibly in granting immunity to Leuci for incriminating fellow detectives in crimes he could have been charged with as well...
...The script is studded with so many ersatz '40s lines that at first I thought he was parodying them...
...Nor does it help that later, in a leaden attempt to supply a retrospective reason, Lumet and Allen have first Danny and then one of the prosecutors announce that he "wanted absolution...
...When one of Danny's partners, Gus Levy (Jerry Orbach), defies the "Chase Commission" and continues pursuing drug dealers under threat of an indictment, we're practically urged to cheer...
...in the third, he is already bargaining for immunity...
...The SIU outfit was found to be particularly "dirty...
...The filmmakers haven't bothered to provide Danny with a background that would make the concern convincing...
...There is a fine scene near the end of the movie when Danny calls up one of his partners and admits that he has betrayed him...
...So what if the SIU detectives take a few bribes...
...The best that Matty and Ned can do in her modern mansion is loll about together in a bathtub filled with ice cubes...
...In addition, an endless number of deals and setups are quickly introduced and then just as quickly resolved...
...We're the only thing between you and the jungle...
...From the evidence in Body Heat, in his case that treatment is clearly deserved...
...But Prince of the City tries to be art, not li fe, and the murkiness of Danny's decision to cooperate makes him less than totally credible...
...It has a socially significant theme (police corruption) that is presented on a large scale (126 speaking parts, 100 locations, 280 scenes...
...A shady lady, Matty Walker (played by a wooden-faced nonentity named Kathleen Turner), lures a hapless male, Ned Racine (that fine actor William Hurt, wasted once again), into murdering her husband, Edmund (Richard Crenna...
...Infact, Lumet and Allen's conception of how the Knapp Commission exploited its informants is so damagingly Kafkaesque that I'm almost tempted to think it was politically inspired...
...then it turns out that she's not really Matty...
...But he does bring to the role both the frenetic energy of a born con man trying to make the best deal for himself, and the pathos of a hustler suddenly way out of his league...
...The only real question is why things seem to have gotten better for him...
...so what if they supply heroin to their stoolies...
...Nothing we see in between gives plausibility to this...
...The difficulty with Prince of the City is not its viewpoint, however, or even its sentimentality...
Vol. 64 • September 1981 • No. 18
