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A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Lumet again builds a morally exhausting institutional drama around an officer whose cooperation against entrenched police corruption turns every friendship and professional allegiance into a threat.
02
Why this pick
Like Serpico, it follows a principled insider choosing public truth over personal safety, with procedural detail, mounting isolation, and a tense, unsentimental view of institutional self-protection.
03
Why this pick
A tougher, more cynical Lumet police drama: its investigation pits a determined official against a protected culture of brutality, corruption, and political calculation in New York.
04
Why this pick
Its quiet sheriff gradually confronts a closed fraternity of corrupt officers, echoing Serpico’s conflict between conscience and the coercive loyalty demanded by police culture.
05
Why this pick
A psychologically charged corruption investigation centered on the dangerous intimacy of policing, where pursuing a compromised colleague steadily erodes the investigator’s private life and certainty.
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01 / THE STORY
Working as a uniformed patrolman, Frank Serpico excels at every assignment. He moves on to plainclothes assignments, where he slowly discovers a hidden world of corruption and graft among his own colleagues. After witnessing cops commit violence, take payoffs, and other forms of police corruption, Serpico decides to expose what he has seen, but is harassed and threatened by his peers. His struggle leads to infighting within the police force, problems in his personal relationships, and his life being threatened. Finally, after being shot in the face during a drug bust on February 3, 1971, he testifies before the Knapp Commission, a government inquiry into NYPD police corruption between 1970 and 1972. After receiving a New York City Police Department Medal of Honor and a disability pension, Serpico resigns from the force and moves to Switzerland.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Officer Frank Serpico
Chief Sidney Green
Tom Keough
Capt. Insp. McClain
Laurie
Bob Blair
D. A. Tauber
Joey
