For this writer, a member of a VHS generation that also hadn’t seen much, Lumet served a similar role. Whatever their excesses, the best of his films have a grinding inexorableness that is hard to forget. It’s this tenacity that vindicates Lumet from his occasional affinity for the glib — a drive towards thoroughness that finds its greatest exemplar in the police-corruption drama Prince of the City, whose peculiar exhilaration is intrinsically linked to its exhaustion, if not its exhaustiveness.

Bereft of Lumet’s early-period visual showboating, Prince renders its central moral quandary — high-flying undercover cop Danny Ciello’s (Treat Williams) attempt to inform on the corruption running rampant through his squad without burning his partners (or himself) — not only multi-faceted, but positively multi-vocal. In the final sequences, an assortment of secondary characters from various levels of the Justice Department sit in a room and debate whether to indict Ciello along with his fellow officers, or let him off in recognition of the invaluable services that he’s rendered to them. Lumet allows each man not only to state his argument but to explain the moral and intellectual basis of his position.

From the private drama of an individual, Lumet here creates a larger and surprisingly rigorous interrogation of that individual’s motives and actions. There’s a suspense and a fascination to this sequence that goes beyond what will happen to this one character: it’s the drama of a filmmaker forgoing the easy rewards of closure and following the multivalent implications of his scenario to their logical, and logically imperfect, end. If this was by no means a constant enough feature of Lumet’s films to stand as a kind of authorial signature, it was nevertheless something he did unusually well — and as so many filmmakers receive passive praise for merely policing their own self-defined boundaries, Lumet’s curious inclinations towards sprawl offer pleasures and questions that I, and I hope many others, continue to value.

This essay was adapted from a longer article in Cinema Scope 47 (Summer 2011).