Yesterday (Thursday, 6.15) I wrote that as much as I’ve long admired Treat Williams‘ lead performance as Danny Ciello, a morally conflicted detective of Italian-American descent, in Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (’81), what Williams does in this landmark film is “more about pushing than being.”
In her “5001 Nights At The Movies” review excerpt book, Pauline Kael says the following:
“Treat Williams has a very closed face — the kind of opaque face that is like a brick wall in front of the camera. And that may be why Williams, as a New York City police officer who agrees to be wired and to obtain evidence about corruption in his unit, plays each scene as an acting exercise — going through so much teary, spiritual agony that you want to throw something at him.
“[Williams] acts all over the place yet the movie — 2 hours and 47 minutes of pseudo-documentary seriousness — is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what’s going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends. Things don’t begin to come together until you’re headed into the third hour, when the cross suspended from Williams’ neck lights up, like a balloon over his head, announcing ‘Penance! Absolution!’
“There’s one remarkable performance (it’s mostly in the last section): Jerry Orbach, as the tough-minded cop Gus Levy, acts with such sureness and economy that while Williams is flailing about Orbach magnetizes the camera.
“Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film has a super-realistic overall gloom, and the people are so ‘ethnic’ and yell so much that you begin to long for the sight of a cool blonde in bright sunshine.”
I disagree with Kael about Prince in a fundamental way. It’s completely committed to the hardcore process of internal investigations and the unloading of personal guilt, and especially to Ciello grappling with the double-edged morality of exposing corruption while simultaneously (and rather mystifyingly) bringing more and more ruin and torment into the lives of his friends..slowly and gradually.
It’s half-amazing and half-baffling the way the film keeps going and going with scene after scene of district attorneys and prosecutors sifting through tapes, transcripts and testimony…it’s spellbinding in a ballsy sort of way…a way that perhaps no other cops-and-bad-guys film has ever quite equalled.
Like I said a couple of days ago Prince of the City convinced me that no feeling of moral cleansing or purification justifies what Ciello (i.e., Robert Leuci in real life) did to his SIU partners.
But Kael has a point about Williams’ performance.