A Tale of Two Cities

Boston vs. New York. Red Sox vs. Yankees. New England clam chowder vs. Manhattan. Patriots vs. Giants. (Well, that one should be Foxboro, Mass., vs. E. Rutherford, N.J.) The two cities - my birth city and my sort-of-adopted one - have been rivals in just about everything for years. In 1972, New York-born filmmaker Sidney Lumet made Serpico, which garnered Al Pacino a nomination for Best Actor. The movie, based on Peter Maas' nonfiction book, was very much a product of New York City. Ten years later, Lumet directed Paul Newman to his own Best Actor nomination in The Verdict. It too was based on a book - here, a novel by Barry Reed - but it was set in my hometown. How did Lumet do at capturing Beantown and Gotham?


When Sidney Lumet directed the 1972 police-corruption saga Serpico, he said he wanted "truth of locations,” and he finds this truth masterfully. The native son easily captures the feelings of an immigrant’s child, the old-school shoe store and the open fire hydrants of Little Italy butting against Frank Serpico’s (Al Pacino) desire to move to Greenwich Village, study at NYU and become a police officer. Lumet doesn’t harp on the family angle as Pacino’s character becomes increasingly embroiled in the morally ambiguous cop world, but he still makes Serpico a true city film. He shoots in four of the five boroughs, everywhere from Coney Island and Williamsburg to a park by a pre-renovation Yankee Stadium. Serpico’s speciality is his ability to be of the people, and Pacino’s clothing and beard so achieve this that watching the movie is like watching a documentary about Village counterculture in the 1960s.

Whether it’s because the source material (a predictable novel by Barry Reed) wasn’t as dynamic or Lumet wasn’t as familiar with the city, the feeling of place suffered 10 years later when he directed the Boston legal drama The Verdict. Lumet uses accents, ruddy-complexioned old-school alcoholics and Irish names aplenty as his main setting markers. As a native Bostonian, I swear, not everyone from Southie and Dorchester has an accent or roots in Dublin. Fortunately, the speech isn’t of a Rob Morrow-in-Quiz-Show atrocity, but it would have been nice to hear some working-class people talk in “normal” voices. It’s not that a New Yorker can’t work in Boston: Martin Scorsese made The Departed feel like The Whitey Bulger Story, even though the film’s roots were in fact a Hong Kong flick. But were it not for occasional pans of triple deckers on hilly streets, The Verdict could have been set in Toronto.