the new hollywood movement was largely established by a generation of young filmmakers tapping into a newly liberal youth culture permitting of european existentialist ideas—which makes sidney lumet a bit of an outlier within this lot. not only was he half a generation older than most of his peers in the 1970s, but his movies were less about life and death and the immobility that comes with reflecting too hard on existence than they were about hitting similarly anticlimactic conclusions with their subjects fully driven by their careers as cops or robbers. whereas most of these movies saw figures gliding through life in neutral (if not free-fall) until coming to a halt, lumet was more interested in individuals seeing how far their moral speedometer goes before their inevitable crash.
meanwhile, the era’s proclivities for vague personal philosophies and drug-induced moodiness seemingly opened the door for lumet to instead draw upon the tragedy of theater to fuel the arcs of serpico and dog day afternoon—two real-life accounts that felt equally symptomatic of the politics of the ’70s in america. in doing so he basked in visual media’s newfound liberalism he helped to permit throughout his work in the 1960s, as violence, nudity, and taboo subject matter (department-wide police scandals, gender-affirming surgeries) became the norm in movies. naturally, lumet took it upon himself to ensure that these subjects continued to be addressed and utilized responsibly.
new-hollywood claustrophobia/old-hollywood grandiosity (1973-1978)
serpico (written by waldo salt and norman wexler, adapted from the biography by peter mass; 1973)
biopic that feels equally inspired by concerns that friedkin wasn’t being explicit enough in french connection and lumet’s inability to forget the mccarthy era—it ultimately has more in common with zombie movies than any police procedural as a lone moral figure gradually learns how rampantly a destructive ideology runs around him. there’s a similar sympathy leant to pacino here as there was to connery in the offence (albiet, obviously, under much different circumstances) as we increasingly see the detective as a victim of his job until he reaches his breaking point, upon which he irrationally takes out his rage in a domestic space. somehow we get the sense this only happens to the cop who opts to fill out paperwork while his colleagues physical assault the perp—never to the cop who finds idiotic joy in chasing down his target.
structurally, both films also ambiguously begin with the aftermath of the climactic scene of violence, though the pacing here returns to the accelerated timeline of the group (this movie evidently spans 11 years, though it never makes that fact explicit as lumet trusts his audience to be intelligent enough to reference pacino’s facial hair, piercings, and animal companions to understand how much time has passed between each scene). also very much unlike the offence, upon this most recent watch i couldn’t help noticing the movie’s sense of humor in scenes where a guy in an endless parade of the craziest fits you’ve ever seen won’t even let the NYPD put a dime in the parking meter for him.
i realize this movie was likely inspired by shows like mod squad and hawaii five-0 striving to make policing seem hip, but i can’t help thinking about how propagandistic this would’ve felt if it were remade in my lifetime. gosling as serpico increasingly decked out in H&M crossing the brooklyn bridge belting along to tame impala before his date takes him to a highsnobriety party.
lovin’ molly (written by stephen j. friedman, adapted from the novel leaving cheyenne by larry mcmurtry; 1974)
jules and jim-type love-triangle tragedy with sex-comedy undertones and a cow birthing scene. when you also consider the literal pissing contest the movie opens with, this doesn’t quite feel like lumet at his most subtle, as can be expected from a rushed script that doesn’t have enough to say about the romantic cliches of women who grew up abused opting to marry abusive men instead of someone so naive that they can only sleep with women they don’t love to justify its dusty existence. the text does feel ripe for new hollywood with its themes of hopeless lack of connection and melodramatic anticlimax, and it’s interesting to consider tony perkins as lumet’s moral protagonist in a position where he’s simply too un-silly to get laid (he’s as out of his element in a relationship with blythe danner as lumet was filming a movie in texas). fascinating how jeff wound up being the famous bridges after he acted very well in a very good mcmurtry adaptation, whereas beau wound up not being the famous bridges after he acted very poorly in a very bad mcmurtry adaptation.
murder on the orient express (written by paul dehn, adapted from the novel by agatha christie; 1974)
dud within the lumet filmography not only in the sense that its tone directly opposes his gritty urban realism (kinda like coppola, my man simply did not have the juice for comedy even as a secondary genre), but also because its source material is pure entertainment value with no sense of moral conflict applicable to an audience that’s never committed a fraction of a murder. speaking of fractions, a third of this movie is just albert finney doing his best lunatic accent as he very reasonably interrogates a dozen passengers as to why they would ever take a train, and another third of the movie is just him telling them why they would ever take a train, with much of the rest of the runtime being devoted to some compelling b-roll of the train’s exterior as it travels through eastern european countryside. hugely nostalgic for a kidnapped-rich-baby era i’m not particularly interested in cinematically.
dog day afternoon (written by frank pierson, adapted from an article by P.F. kluge and thomas moore; 1974)
cops-and-robbers film for a particular moment when it had begun to feel much easier to empathize with the robbers than to sanction cops’ treatment of them. peak of lumet’s analysis of his two favorite subjects—law and media spectacle—as he explores how they tend to respond to each other: the cameras don’t show up without police presence, while that police presence represses its taste for blood as long as the cameras are rolling. it feels like lumet is aware of this dialog just as much as he is the more explicit one between pacino and NYPD as he speculates how the two engage in some ritualistic dance to create ratings-generating fiction out of tumultuous real-life storylines, only to give them an unhappy ending as soon as the next breaking story takes its place on the air—all while tragic-figure pacino increases his prize package to resemble that at the end of an episode of price is right.
which isn’t to say he isn’t the film’s central figure, as he manipulates authority figures in the precise way the ex-con does in that episode of the office where a new hire claims prison is more liberated than the modern white-collar workspace. as the bank employees quickly warm up to pacino (made more believable as a character by lumet finally hitting his comedic peak, thanks largely to improvised dialog sessions), it becomes clear that this man is terrorizing the institution he’s holding up rather than its employees, who he’s treating much better than the cops outside will in the aftermath of a quickly-botched robbery that likely inspired the coens in every department (including the hiring of chuck durning) except the treatment of humanity backed into a corner, as lumet naturally opts for empathy where joel and ethan always choose ridicule.
lumet similarly backs himself into a corner immediately (the police have already arrived on the scene 15 minutes into this two-hour movie), but quickly bucks heist-film convention to instead examine the biography of a real-life figure who fell victim to the PD/media industrial complex, with comedy turning to tragedy as we watch the protagonist’s perceived autonomy slowly slip away at the hands of the state as the film dissolves into a familiarly flatlining new hollywood conclusion, pacino as christ-figure enduring jeers from the same crowd he’d just won over.
network (written by paddy chayefsky; 1976)
movie bordering on science fiction in the way its prophecies of humankind’s downfall wound up being decades ahead of corporations acting upon many of the same ideas as earnest business plans. much in the same way lumet picked up where friedkin left off in denouncing obsessive policing, here he runs with christine chubbuck’s manifesto to derail this notion established over the past quarter century by bullshit mainstream visual media that everything’s fine when society appears to be collapsing at every turn, highlighting the growing gulf between the chaos of real life (ironically lubricated by expanding TV coverage) and TV’s unwillingness to rethink its happy-ending formulas. in doing so he foresees anger (articulated or not) as the primary language of politics; he foresees corporations defunding news for not generating enough income while sticking their fingers in entertainment programing to make it worse for everyone but themselves; he foresees john oliver giving his network the finger every week between sharing opinions the liberal elite would consider radical and raving about wanting to fuck animals.
while credit goes to chayefsky for the script’s brilliance, lumet taps into his unparalleled skill at making the most uncinematic stage material fit for a feature film by turning conversations about ratings into satiric gold while slipping his own propagandistic agenda into a studio-backed production—both in howard beale’s radical wake-up calls about our increasingly humanoid existences as the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world fills our brain, and in expanding the scope of what’s permissible in a studio film, whether that’s breasts, trans women, or a searing condemnation of the medium the film’s bound to find its second life on. all of which services a single darkly comedic punchline to close the film, but not the conversation on increasingly personal ideals inevitably being swallowed up by bigger and bigger business entities. disney was far from wiped off the air in network’s aftermath—instead, what was once a ubiquitous symbol of childhood continues to balloon far beyond parody as a malicious corporate force.
equus (written by peter shaffer, based on his play; 1977)
naturally, after hitting his stride with three near-consecutive hits comfortably set in NYC that all finally strike the balance of smart comedy and prescient social tragedy he’d long striven for, lumet returned to the UK to helm a dark, lengthy, convoluted psychodrama that opens with one of the period’s most celebrated english actors screaming directly into the camera that a kid may have fucked a horse. between all the full-frontal male nudity and graphically stylized violence against animals and the fact that his prior psychosexual films fell flat, i get the sense this was a “one for me” type project for lumet—or perhaps one for peter shaffer, as he mostly stays true to the playwright’s text, refusing to even cling to a throwaway line implying that the central teen character’s psychosis was in part the product of TV-induced shell-shock. in fact the film’s broader generational divide recalls network and, beyond that, the era that inspired the montage film from parallax view and its jumbling of family/religion/romance/sex/beasts of burden. if anyone else made this, i’d consider more deeply burton’s character and his midlife career crisis as a proxy for the director—but lumet has always seemed disinterested in inserting himself into his films in that compain-y sort of way.
the wiz (written by joel schumacher, based on the play by william f. brown, based on the book by l. frank baum; 1978)
friends-we-made-along-the-way urtext boldly reclaimed for black audiences as much as it is for the hollywood expatriation movement led by lumet, not only depicting NYC as the LA-coded oz, but even helming the most expensive movie to be filmed there (NYC, not oz) at the time. in addition to swapping the story’s iconic soundtrack for something produced by quincy jones, it equally shakes up lumet’s penchant for claustrophobic stories told with subtle visual brilliance, as the old-hollywood set pieces (further isolating this from his recent new-hollywood streak) are among the biggest draws here along with some truly bizarre creative decisions (massive chia-pet richard prior head, jacked gimp-suit flying monkeys). still feels like a lumet film at its heart between dorothy’s arrival in emerald city quickly becoming a media event and the racial-/class-consciousness overt to an all-black cast confronting oppressors (tin man literally exclaims “free at last” at one point) and ultimately realizing politicians won’t save them—aside from the fact that it might’ve made kids even more afraid of subways and, uh, foreign cultures, this feels like a much more grounded cautionary tale than the original. very odd watching sid’s mother in law hamming it up in the final scene knowing his wife left him at some point during filming.