Original NY Times review, 8/9/81

An incisive contemporary review, for your reading pleasure:

LUMET'S PRINCE OF THE CITY
By JANET MASLIN
Published: August 19, 1981, Wednesday

Although Sidney Lumet's ''Prince of the City'' has an atmosphere deeply redolent of crime and corruption, very few specific misdeeds are ever shown on the screen. They don't have to be. Mr. Lumet's film offers such a sharply detailed landscape, such a rich and crowded portrait, that his characters reveal themselves fully by the ways they move, eat, speak, listen or lie.

The lying is terribly important, because so many different styles of dissembling are on display here, and because there is no one in the story who isn't forced into dishonesty sooner or later. Danny Ciello, the film's title character, is a man who sets out to tell the truth and winds up the very worst liar of all. Danny, a swaggering young police detective, doesn't see himself as a crusading hero when he decides to gather evidence of police corruption, early in the story. And he doesn't see himself entirely as a villain when his revelations bring catastrophe to his friends. Danny appears to regard himself as someone who expected to undertake something simple, only to find the task so complicated that it might prove to be impossible. The progress of this energetic, hugely ambitious, and finally sprawling movie is very like Danny's own.

''Prince of the City,'' which opens today at Cinemas 1, 2 and 3, begins as a crisp, thrilling adventure, as Danny embarks recklessly on his journey into unknown territory. The borders of his own world are delineated beautifully. In just a few short scenes - Mr. Lumet's economy in parts of this film is simply dazzling - we glimpse the cops who are Danny's devoted friends, the family that is overlooked for the sake of his career, the bullying, pugnacious manner in which he conducts himself and the dangerous intensity with which he embraces tragedy.

In a scene with two junkies, Danny finds himself both hating and relishing his power over these people, and perhaps secretly savoring his own invulnerability. This may be part of what leads him to work as an informer, and it may not. When Danny decides to begin taperecording his conversations with crooked cops and mobsters, he takes a step the film never fully accounts for - any more than Robert Daley's book could explain Robert Leuci, the ex-detective upon whose story the movie is based. But though Danny's presence is what binds the movie together, he doesn't dominate the action, and his motives aren't vitally important. The film concentrates much more compellingly on the human backdrop for Danny's action than it does on his inner workings.

''Prince of the City'' has an enormous cast of incidental characters; no one, aside from Treat Williams as Danny, has a large role in a film this densely populated. And yet the brief characterizations are so keenly drawn that dozens of them stand out with the forcefulness of major performances. As Danny begins to drift away from the life he's familiar with, the landmarks of his voyage become a lawyer here, a mobster there, all of them instantly in focus thanks to carefully chosen sets, costumes and mannerisms, and thanks to casting that is superb. Though Mr. Lumet is clearly concerned with the moral ramifications of Danny's behavior, he establishes them better through the specifics of the actors' behavior than he does through more generalized debate.

The film is finally indecisive about the rectitude of Danny's actions, and it means to be. A key scene late in the book, with Mr. Leuci giving courtroom testimony against the cop to whom he was closest (called Gus Levy here, and played wonderfully by Jerry Ohrbach) would have made a heel out of Danny in the audience's eyes, and its omission is revealing. But Mr. Lumet's choice to suspend judgment, provocative at first, becomes troublesome -especially in the last of the film's nearly three hours, when his direction has wandered as far from its initial briskness as Danny has from his own safe berth. In avoiding the danger of jumping to a facile conclusion about Danny, Mr. Lumet heads off so far in the opposite direction that he ends the film on a disappointing, inconclusive note. So much evidence has been presented, so many lawyers have trooped across the screen, so much time has been devoted to the question of Danny's essential honesty that a verdict is in order - if not from a moral standpoint, then from a dramatic one.

Much of the burden of the movie's uncertainty falls upon Mr. Williams, whose performance must fill in those directorial omissions. Accordingly, he does his best work in the early part of the story, when his effort is most collaborative with Mr. Lumet and with the other actors. Mr. Williams, like the character he plays, is better off in company than he is alone; he brings a playful, arrogant, effectively brazen quality to Danny's maneuverings. And his rapport with the hoods in the story (Ron Karabatsos, Tony Munafo and Ron Maccone are the most memorable of a very strong lineup) is so easy that it speaks volumes about his seedy side.

With the lawyers, especially with Norman Parker as the first to win his trust, Paul Roebling as a WASP who confounds him and Bob Balaban as a fussy, vindictive prosecutor, Danny is nervous in a way that's equally revealing. With his police friends (among them Mr. Ohrbach, Carmine Caridi and Richard Foronjy) he shows the devotion of a lover, much more of it than he shows to his rock-solid wife (Lindsay Crouse). But as he wanders far from the people and places that have been familiar, Danny becomes less vivid. On unsteady ground (several scenes in which Danny loses his former allies are set aboard ferry boats), he registers a very touching fearfulness. But Mr. Williams, competent and plausible throughout the film and sometimes much better than that, never brings to Danny's lonely moments the depth or importance that might make him more tragic than confused. And the last part of the film leaves him little to do except fall further and further into limbo.

''Prince of the City'' begins with the strength and confidence of a great film, and ends merely as a good one. The achievement isn't what it first promises to be, but it's exciting and impressive all the same.