Al Pacino · 1973 · Signature Roles

Serpico (1973) — Al Pacino

Frank Serpico was a real New York police officer who refused bribes and reported corruption, and paid for his honesty with loneliness, suspicion, and a gunshot wound during a drug raid.

Frank Serpico was a real New York police officer who refused bribes and reported corruption, and paid for his honesty with loneliness, suspicion, and a gunshot wound during a drug raid. Al Pacino plays him as a man whose principles are not noble abstractions but daily, exhausting choices.

The performance is famous for its look — the beard, the beads, the counterculture clothes that made Serpico an outsider in his own precinct — but its power is in Pacino’s frustration. He is not playing a saint. He is playing a man who cannot understand why doing the right thing makes everyone hate him, and who keeps doing it anyway.

Serpico earned Pacino another Oscar nomination and became a touchstone for films about institutional corruption. Its hero is not the system. Its hero is the man the system tries to break.