Talk:Serpico

Chief's fears
The plot line says: "Chief Sidney Green fears Serpico may have been shot by a cop." In the first scene, the chief is clearly upset and concerned about Serpico's safety right after the shooting when he assigns a 24-hour guard and based on his demeanor. There would be good reason for the chief to be concerned a cop shot him--based on the rest of the film. But he never says anything directly to indicate exactly who or why Serpico was shot or why he would need a guard. Watching it, and knowing that Serpico was a whisteblower before I started the movie, I believed that was probably the chief's concern. But the film is clever in use of "show don't tell", and we don't know precisely what the chief is thinking or fearing, or why he assigned the guard. This ambiguity is part of what draws the viewer in to find out why the chief feels there needs to be a 24-hour guard. So although I think many viewers would tend to believe this was likely the chief's fear, the sentence above is too direct, and does not do justice to the screenplay. Unfortunately, I can't think of a simple way to describe the beauty in which the director gives us strong clues about what the chief is fearing. I will try and come back to this and see if I can think of something. In the meantime, I put in a comment in the plot to point here with my desire to improve the sentence to say it more subtly as the screenplay does. --David Tornheim (talk) 10:25, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Where is the book
The book preceded the movie.

Why is there apparently no article in Wikipedia about the book by Peter Maas? 2601:200:C000:1A0:A4FC:DC05:FDCF:8E10 (talk) 00:07, 7 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Good observation. I suppose that would be because the movie probably obscured the original success of the book and its existence got reduced to just be the source from which the film was adapted (as it happened to a bunch of other works). There's always room for improvement in Wikipedia!-- GDuwen  Holler!  18:57, 7 September 2022 (UTC)