In many ways, Sidney Lumet's bracing police drama Prince of the City epitomizes the 1970s. Wait, I hear you asking, wasn't it released in 1981? Aren't you a couple of years late, bub?
Indeed you're right, and maybe this is why it didn't do very well when it came out. The decade that had given rise to it was already over, Reagan was ensconced in the White House, and Spielberg had released Raiders of the Lost Ark two months before. People wanted fun, pastel-colored entertainment. They were pretty much fed up with dour.
Because that's what we think of when we think of the '70s, isn't it? Dourness? Gloominess? Cynicism? Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation, playing his saxophone alone and in despair, or Martin Sheen traveling up the river to kill both Colonel Kurtz and the last few remaining dreams of American moral infallibility in Apocalypse Now, or Roy Scheider dancing with a prostitute while the mob hitmen walk in to kill him at the end of Sorcerer? Absolutely. In cinema and culture, it's usually seen as a downer of a decade.
But I'm here to try to convince you that there's something else present in many of the cinematic works of the 1970s, despite (or perhaps because of) their cynicism: a vital and almost subterranean optimism. And it's an optimism that we're in desperate need of today.
Based on a true-crime book of the same name from 1978, the story Prince of the City tells is a familiar one in American movies. Daniel Ciello (Treat Williams), the titular Prince of the City, is the lead detective in the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the New York Police Department. He and his four partners and best friends are the big dogs in town: they swagger around busting major drug dealers and mafiosos and keeping the streets safe. But they also all seem to have a lot more money than they should, and the Feds have started an investigation into the NYPD, which is as corrupt as a blackmailer's heart.
Ciello decides that he's going to become an informant for this investigation and help reveal the truth about the corruption, of which he's a part. The reasons for this are complicated – and Williams gives a high-intensity performance that does a fantastic job of exploring them – but basically come down to the fact that he's looking for absolution for falling into a venality that too-closely resembles the actions of the criminals he's putting away.
Soon enough, Ciello is actively working for the Feds, wearing a wire and running investigations into the illegal activities that pervade the whole system, from lawyers and bail-bondsmen down to the cops themselves. He's extremely effective – he didn't get to be the head detective of the SIU because he's bad at the operational side of the job – and only has one rule: he refuses to be involved in any attempt to put heat on his old partners.
Eventually, indictments start to be handed down, and Ciello's role in them is revealed publicly. He and his family are immediately put into protective custody, but he refuses to stop what he's begun. At the same time, as more and more attention gets focused on the investigation, it starts to draw bigger numbers of federal prosecutors. They are more aggressive and don't care that Ciello is trying to do the right thing: they want to prosecute him as well as his partners, suspecting that he perjured himself early on in the investigation by minimizing his accounts of his own wrongdoing.
They turn up the pressure until Ciello eventually breaks and gives up his partners, thereby destroying his closest friendships and alienating himself from the only people he really believed he could trust, and who really believed they could trust him. In the end, Ciello isn't prosecuted, but he is alone in the world. The final scene shows him giving a lecture on surveillance procedure to a classroom of young detectives; when they find out who he, is one of them walks out, scorning him for a rat.
So where, you might ask, is the optimism? Sounds like a pretty downbeat '70s-style movie: a dirty cop tries to make amends, has his life destroyed because of it, and in the end nothing has changed. But the optimism is there if you look for it (as it is in so many '70s movies) hiding right there in the film's understanding of American society itself.
The first way to understand this is to note that Prince of the City sees the legal system as a single, deeply-interconnected entity, from the heroin addict on the street to the judges and prosecutors in the highest offices in the land.
It begins to lay this vision out in a scene early on that shows us why Ciello is finally moving towards trying to address his own criminality. This begins when one of his informants, a heroin user, comes to him desperate for a fix. To help him out, Ciello chases down another of his informants who has just bought some heroin, to try to take some of that stash off of him to give to the first guy. In the process, he loses his temper and beats up his second informant, before splitting the heroin between them. Then, remorseful, he gives the second informant a ride home, where the guy's girlfriend takes the remaining heroin and shoots up before the guy can get a chance to use it himself.
It's a sordid, tragic sequence, and it paints a beautifully complex picture of Ciello. He's out of control, beating up one informant and providing drugs to another (which, the movie reminds us several times, is no different in the eyes of the law than selling drugs), but there is somewhere in him a conscience that makes him want to take care of these people at the same time. And he's also in this position, as he reminds us in dialogue later on, because the only realistic way for him to do his job as a narcotics officer is to have informants, and the only way to keep informants is to be able to provide them with drugs sometimes.
So his criminality is a human failing – something he lives in despair about – and at the same time is a result of the system in which he's enmeshed.
A similar dynamic is at play in the relationships of the cops in the SIU to the big drug dealers. The former argue that the reason it's justified to steal money from the latter when they bust them is that if they don't, the drug dealers will just use that money to buy their way out of their indictments by bribing judges and lawyers. In other words, the cops rationalize their actions by claiming that the system is so deeply flawed that the only way to really punish wrongdoers is for the cops to take away their money outside of that system.
The film isn't interested in either supporting or debunking this logic, so much as it is in trying to understand the psychology of it, and the sense these men have of living in a system that is so dysfunctional as to make breaking oaths of office seem like a reasonable thing to do. In other words, like Ciello and his informants, what the film is exploring here is the relationship between personal and systemic corruption, and the ineradicable links between them.
This all plays out again at the level of the federal prosecutors running the investigation that Ciello is aiding. A pair of them start this investigation at the beginning, and then are promoted on to other jobs, meaning that the people Ciello made his deal with are no longer in charge. And then, when the other prosecutors start to appear on the scene like vultures descending on a carcass, we're given to understand that they too inhabit a system in which justice is a dim abstraction compared with the concrete realities of daily life.
Some are ambitious, and clearly driven to the decisions they make because of their attention to their own career prospects. Others are puritanical, believing that anyone who commits a crime must be prosecuted, or the word "justice" has no meaning. Still others are pragmatic, arguing that if they prosecute Ciello for perjuring himself, they'll never get another informant to work for them. And some are humanistic, arguing that Ciello is a man who is trying to do the right thing to atone for his wrongs, and that to prosecute him would be an immoral betrayal of that. Like everyone else in the film, that is, the decisions they make are always and unavoidably connected to a system that's almost infinitely larger than they are.
So, again, where's the optimism? As I noted above, it begins with the way that the film presents the situations of all of these people – the addicts on the street, the drug kingpins and mafiosos, the cops and lawyers, the judges and the prosecutors – as being directly comparable. But more than simply living under similar psychological circumstances, they are all subject the same grand, encompassing culture, which is rife with terrible strains and perverse incentives.
And this culture, this system of human relations, is dysfunctional not because people are bad or stupid or evil, but because of the extraordinary, terrifying difficulty of trying to hold together a society in which there are things like desperate poverty and unyielding ambition, in which everyone is promised something – the nice, big house in the suburbs that the government eventually provides for Ciello – that not everyone in reality gets to have, in which human beings are prone to deep and radical disagreements over what constitutes things like justice and fairness and loyalty.
Which is to say that in this film, and in a great number of films from the '70s, the cynicism and fury are directed at the near impossibility (but not absolute impossibility) of the American system itself, and the things that that system drives people to. This is why Prince of the City, like so many films from that decade, focuses on the experience of people struggling against these forces, and often even being crushed by them.
And yet buried in this view is a deep, noble belief. Because outrage at the system implies, by the very nature of its existence, the notion that the system is not working and must be changed. It assumes a viewer who can understand this idea, and be stimulated by it. And it also assumes a belief in a kind of humanistic sense of justice writ large – larger than the American Justice System itself, which is just a bureaucratic, administrative body – because outrage must always have a place that we can be outraged from, a comparison we have in our hearts that allows us to look and say: This is tragic. This is wrong.
So the very possibility of comprehending a film like Prince of the City, of being moved by it, relies on the existence of the idea that there is a better way to do things.
A final way of understanding this optimism is to think about what it might provide us today. Some people who are interested in ideas like social justice and policing reform have lost, I think, a firm grasp on the idea that what we are dealing with is an interconnected system that enmeshes everyone it touches, from people involved in criminal activities in the street to the men and women in expensive suits who parade around the halls of the White House and the Justice Department. Or, rather, some reformers are willing to admit that they themselves are the victims of a bad system, but to their adversaries – particularly the cops – they attribute what we might think of as atomized agency: they are bad because they are bad people, or hold bad beliefs.
So they talk about dismantling police departments, as if rebuilding new departments without changing the larger social order in which they are embedded would not eventually result in the exact same abuses emerging. Or they talk about wanting to hold police "accountable," or about the value of monitoring them through body cameras. These are fine measures, of course, an effective in a local sense.
But you will notice the language in which these arguments are couched is the language of neoliberalism, a worldview in which we are all disconnected, atomized individuals who need to be measured and tested and watched vigilantly so that the bad apples among us can be tossed out of the barrel, in order that the good apples can go about fulfilling their ambitions. Which is, of course, uncomfortably close to right-wing fever dreams of a purified land.
In contrast, the fury of a good deal of the cinema of the '70s came out of exactly the idea that we are not isolated but connected, the idea that we are all immersed together in a system that pushes all of us towards corruption. The cop and the criminal and the politician live in the same world, they operate in the same cultural matrix. And to address this, one must see it as the organic, community-on-a-grand-scale thing that it is. If you want to change a specific culture, that is, be it a policing culture, an educational culture, or a political culture, you first have to change the larger culture. You must direct your fury at the entire shape of society, rather than one of its manifestations.
This is not a dead idea. People like David Simon are pursuing it relentlessly in film and television, and a number of young activists are pursuing it in their own contexts. And it's not necessarily a cheery one, as changing the culture itself is far more difficult than putting a sign declaring your resistance bona fides in your window and going about your business.
But it is an optimistic one, because it assumes that to be furious means you still have something in you that you're burning to defend.
Enjoy this piece? If you want to support me, please share tylersage.substack.com with anyone you know who's interested in film, culture, ideas, or ebullience. And if you disagree, let me know in the comments!
Also, as this is an entirely reader-funded endeavor, I'd be eternally grateful if you'd consider subscribing for $5 a month. For this mere pittance, you'll receive every piece in full, get full access to the archives of this site, and greatly contribute to my ability to keep writing and keep pursuing the causes of truth and justice in my own oddball ways.
If you'd like to read more of my work, my book on William Klein's cult classic superhero film Mr. Freedom is now available from Liverpool University Press. And my novel The Committers is available here.