Serpico
Regular middle-class second generation immigrant cannot make it on the police force, no matter how many trappings of upper class signifiers he picks up. He takes the harder way and gets shot for his troubles.
Our boy is a regular son of Italian immigrants living on the ghetto. He’s smart and very sociable, so he has no trouble climbing the police ladder towards detective. What really bothers him is the outright corruption, so many protection rackets ran straight off precincts, so many cops busy collecting the bribes, it leaves little time for actual police work. The top brass is apathetic, they prefer their big shellfish restaurants.
No matter how many times he switches departments or gets transferred against his will, bribery and corruption are there too. His fellow peer pressure him into taking the money in every way they can. Carrot or stick, nothing works. There are some allies, but they have little power, and many headwinds to fight against.
His personal life is a classic hippie stereotype. Free Love, a lot of partners, but mostly collected from the higher class milieu, vapid and shallow people that pretend to be artists. His better partner is just next door, a middle class girl like him (thinly characterised), but the stresses of work blow their relationship to smithereens. He can’t stop working, suffering from the workaholic mentality inherited from his parents, probably.
This is a tour de force for Al Pacino, everyone else are mere super side characters. With cameos by F. Murray Abraham and Emmet Walsh, what class. This was released the year after the real Serpico retired from the force, that’s just incredible. The turn around time for this is insane.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.