Coming in at thee hours,Prince of The City must rate as one of the longest films I've seen; and it's certainly one of the best New York cop thrillers out; maybe one of the best cop thrillers, period. Sidney Lumet picks up and develops from the earlier themes he started with Al Pacino in Serpico - although the moral certainties displayed in that film are noticeably absent here.Based on Robert Daley's novel of the same name, and the experiences of cop turned crime novelist - lecturer the late Bob Leuci, Prince of The City makes compelling viewing. Detective Danny Ciello of NYPD's Special Investigation Unit - specialising in narcotics and organised crime; working city wide with no external supervision, one character notes, starts to experience a series of qualms about the more ''unorthodox' aspects of his work. After a couple of false starts, he agrees to cooperate with a federal commission, under the illusion he can pick and choose his targets and keep his partners in the clear.He soon finds that much more will be expected of him and that his new colleagues are neither reliable or trustworthy.Treat Williams puts in a first class performance as the increasingly tormented Ciello, the late Jerry Orbach is a powerhouse as the partner (one of several) he will betray. Danny's decisions have tragic implications for his family, colleagues and associates. Yet his hands are not clean - sooner or later he will have to face the consequences of some earlier actions....despite his less than truthful accounts.Prince of The City protrays the problems of policing a big city, perhaps any big city, with a gritty realism that most police procedurals only dream about - perhaps rivalled only by The French Connection. It's a having an exhaust journey into man's descent into a foggy morass of grey morality, where nothing is what it appears...and the uncertain redemption that follows.

For years I have heard that Sidney Lumet's "Prince Of The City" was a lost classic, a sleeper hit that was under-appreciated, a gem. I was very disappointed when I finally watched it- it's two hours and forty minutes of the most numbing, predictable, incessant over-acting and cringe-worthy clichés.The first forty minutes of the movie are good enough to suck you in, as Treat Williams plays a crooked, guilt-ridden cop who decides to cooperate with Internal Affairs to nab other crooked cops. "I won't rat on my partners," he vows, and the rest of the movie is spent watching him rat on his partners. Treat Williams' performance is embarrassing, and he spends the movie screaming tough-guy monologues too dumb for Acting 101. He genuinely looks clueless in certain parts of the movie, going over-the-top and practically begging for an Oscar nomination. It's pathetic.But it's not all his fault: Director Sidney Lumet makes this the kitchen sink of cop dramas. The movie features 22 lawyer characters that could have easily been condensed down to 3... there are too many cops and way too much dialogue, so much redundancy and so much extraneous information that by the second half of the movie I simply stopped keeping score. Williams' character is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid if he believes he's going to get out of this situation cleanly... watching him rant and rave over the inevitabilities that come with turning state's evidence is infuriating: "How the HELL did I get here?!?"You volunteered.There is an odd homosexual undertone to the movie as the male characters all touch and hug one another far too long and far too often. The "protection" of Williams' character by Federal Agents is laughable: he's allowed to get out of the car in strange neighborhoods and approach crime lords and only then do the two sixty-something bodyguards run up to make sure no one tries to off him. Ridiculous. When the Uncle Nick character is whacked and his body discovered in a garbage can the actor clearly blinks and breathes- not once but twice during a sloppy, lingering shot. Subplots about Williams' brother and father are dropped without any resolution. Lindsay Crouse as Carla is in an entirely different movie, and her character makes little or no sense within the film we're watching. Characters have absurd and exaggerated names, with occasionally hilarious results: "We're gonna bring in Marinaro and Mayo" can easily be confused with mayonnaise and tomato sauce.I always like to find one good thing in a film and here it is Ron Karabatsos as DeBennedeto. The man is an absolute natural on screen, and one of those actors you never doubt for a split second as the character he's playing. It's a shame the direction lets him go to waste. Why Sidney Lumet didn't edit this film down to its core is beyond me... it's endless bureaucratic talking heads broken up by Treat's screeching and the promise of action that Never arrives.I think Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" is one of the greatest movies ever made- it's in my Top Twenty all-time. I also think "Serpico" is great, but I have to call 'em like I see 'em... "Prince Of The City" is a ponderous bore, a turgid slog through the most insignificant and grating aspects of police informants and legal technicalities. It's a disaster- like a movie stitched together from deleted scenes of the worst episodes of "Law & Order." At one point in the movie a federal attorney who we've never seen before- and will never see again- asks to speak to Treat Williams for a moment. Treat stands up and puts down his sandwich, but the lawyer assures him he can bring the sandwich with him for this particular meeting. He does, and neither the scene, the lawyer or the sandwich is ever mentioned again. For me this sums up the entire movie: too many details, too many characters, and way too much talking without any payoff at all.GRADE: D-

"The law doesn't know the streets." But that doesn't mean that blurring the lines of the law is necessarily a good thing. Many law officials criticized this film during its release, perceiving it as glorifying its corrupt cops and vilifying the prosecutors who toiled to convict them. That is not what the film does. There are no black and white hats here. The story divides its characters into two sides, yes, but they are all struggling throughout to assert a concrete ideology within the oceanic gray area that is the law, and the good and evil it represents.The axis of the film is that Danny Ciello will not inform on his partners. Outside of his wife and kids, who know them like uncles, they are the only people who care about him. He will make the deal to talk about the involvement of narcotics in the corrupt activities of other cops, but not his dear and implicitly loyal friends. As we watch this movie, it is about narcs and New York City crime, but Sidney Lumet wants the underpinnings to be just as visible, how in a corrupt world, one cannot go straight without burning cherished bridges.Lumet gets to the heart of the war on drugs. And we see how it is, was, and will continue to be an utter failure. Addicts depend on the drug. Police depend on the continuation of the trade to uphold their status, and if not their status, their basic living condition. They know that if addicts are going to cooperate with them, they need their drugs. They know that if the courts are going to cooperate with them, drugs must be confiscated and accounted for. They know why they became cops, but they also know more than anyone else on their theoretical side of the law how miserable life is for a junkie. This is a lonely, dangerous and thankless dichotomy of a 24-7 job that's never finished, and if they want to skim a little drug money, that's their way of making it feel more worthwhile.Because Danny Ciello, based on New York cop Bob Leuci, who cooperated in a 1971 internal affairs investigation, is such a demanding and grueling role, almost always on screen in stressful, tiresome and emotional situations, I spent a good deal of the movie having trouble with the casting of Treat Williams. He was a no-name at the time, and that is what Lumet wanted, but there is something incongruously theatrical about Williams that is inconsistent with the rest of the actors. But he does convince us in the latter half of the film that he is falling to bits on account of his job, his testimony and the inextricable fate of the two that he will eventually have no choice but to rat on his friends.Prince of the City is a crime film, about cops, drug dealing, set in New York, and Lumet captures the gritty NYC streets of the 1970s that he encapsulated in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon as if the era had never left. But it's not a violent film at all. There are many characters, hardly any of whom we really get to know beyond their legal and moral standpoints in the story. There is a later scene wherein a meeting of prosecutors debate whether or not a charge of perjury is justified. Its ethical issues are passionate and effective to us, but the verdict is a coin toss in the political climate. The movie answers none of the gray questions posed. It only threatens with possible scenarios.

***SPOILERS*** Overly long and ponderous crime drama involving an elite squad of New York City detectives who take the law into their own hands in fighting the drug epidemic that pledged the Big Apple back in the 1970's. The way these elite cops fight crime is by ripping off the drug dealers that they bust and then, being illegal aliens, ship them off on the first boat or plane back to their native country.With the Chase Commission breathing down corrupt cops necks one of the members of this elite group of law enforcers Danny Ciello, Treat Williams, seeing the writing on the wall decides to come clean. Danny will talk and use a wire but only on dirty politicians and lawyers, as well as D.A's, but not cops especially those cops, or partners, that he works with. This very "high and noble" effort on Danny's part, which was really to save his own hide, has him record hundreds of conversations between him as well as lawyers hoodlums and junkies that in the end would result in some 30 convictions. Danny also gets all of the members of his elite squad indited with the exception of the weak willed and suicidal Officer Bill Mayo ( Don Billett), who ended up blowing his brains out, for crimes that Danny himself committed!It's hard to work up any sympathy for the cops in the movie "Prince of the City" in not only how greedy corrupt as well as, when they's riding high, arrogant they are but how totally lacking and unwilling their in taking their punishment when caught! This to the point of giving up their best friends or partners to the Chase Commission inquisitors in order to save themselves.Danny who's supposed to be the hero in the movie is so gutless and wimpy when he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar, by perjuring himself 40 times after he supposedly came clean, that it seems like the biggest crime in the movie is him getting off Scot-free in the end! Were told by the D.A's office that the only reason that Danny was sprung was that by inditing and convicting him after ratting on his own fellow cops, as well as other members of the law enforcement community, no one like him, a corrupt cop who gets nabbed, will come forward in the future to do the very same thing! Way to go Danny Boy!The movie goes into the sleazy business of cops being drug suppliers to junkies to get information on their suppliers which in fact is who the police are! We see a number of hair-rising scenes of junkies going into convulsions and almost dropping dead because they can't get their fix that are as disturbing as anything you'll see in a slasher horror movie. Danny who's arrogance and false bravado in showing how tough, as well as stupid, he is has him expose himself to his fellow cops as well as the hoodlums that he's secretly recording. This, with his cover now completely blown, has Danny become such a crying sorry a** of a man that even his old lady Clara,Lindsay Crouse, has in the end far more male testosterone's then he does. The at first macho, where things were going his way, Danny Ciello turns into a Valium popping crybaby by the time the movie is just about over when he gets his big moment testifying in open court. Danny by then afraid of his own shadow needs to get himself up to testify by downing at least three Valium tablets, chased down with a couple shots of scotch, just to get on the stand!The most telling scene in the movie has to do with Danny having a talk with his Mafia Uncle Nick's, Ronald Maccone, good friend Mafia soldier Rocky Gazzo, Tony Munafo, who incidentally Danny was setting up by secretly recording their conversation. Rocky somehow sensing what a back-stabbing wimp Danny is tells him right to his face what he, which the movie proves, never would dream of doing. Do you think I'm afraid of going to jail! I spent half may life behind bars and most of the time I spent there was for keeping my mouth shut and not ratting out my friends Rocky tells Danny. That's something that Danny as well as the sh*t-kicking elite members of his drug-busting unit would never have the guts, even to spend one day behind bars, to do.