Lumet: Prince of the City (1981)

Based on Robert Daley’s account of Robert Leuci’s role in the investigation of corruption in the NYPD Narcotics division, Prince of the City revolves around Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), a Narcotics Detective who comes forward to testify on the condition that none of his partners are indicted. Given Lumet's peculiar ability to subsume his vision into those of his screenwriters, it's no surprise that his first screenplay to date is utterly subsumed into its source material – there’s absolutely nothing here that’s extraneous to Leuci’s testimonies, as Lumet and co-writer Jay Presson Allen absorb anything resembling narrative into the rhythm of the investigation. As a result, his camera is more impassive and procedural than ever before, more like a wire than a camera – in fact, at nearly three hours in length, the film often feels like an inchoate version of the longform, scopic possibilities of The Wire, or even Lumet’s own television series, 100 Centre Street. Not only did the DEA request a copy of the film for its procedural accuracy, but a great deal of the film’s dynamism comes from Ciello’s continual attempt to extricate himself from corruption, only to find himself further enmeshed – he continually oscillates between thinking he’s glimpsed the system and realising it’s already pre-empted and parried his next move. A kind of pressure point for the system, then, histrionic under the weight of its vast internal contradictions, he’s continually trying to isolate something that can’t or won’t allow itself to be seen, futuristic in its invisibility, and apocalyptic in its insatiability. Combined with a staggering 130 speaking parts and 135 locations – most lasting a mere glimpse of seconds - it doesn't depict so much as collapse itself into a city being overtaken by some new, alien quantum of bureaucracy, homogenising all the homosocial mortar in its way, and most destructive when it appears to be most constructive. A prophecy, perhaps, of Giuliani’s New York, or at least of Daley and Lumet’s elegiac sequel in Night Falls on Manhattan, it’s Lumet’s purest procedural, just because of how scrupulously it proceeds according to the procedures it depicts - disposing of its locations and extras as soon as they’ve fulfilled their minimum functionality, almost as soon as they're envisaged, it's a film that consumes itself to continue generating itself, an act of creative destruction that beautifully consummates Lumet's self-effacing directorial style.