I know I'm stating things out of order here, but I don't think I've seen a cop movie this deep and intricate since The Departed--and this is deeper by far.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is the saying. Detective Daniel Ciello (Treat Williams) learned that the hard way.

There was a very fine line that separated Ciello and many of his fellow officers from the criminals they busted. They made busts, but they also took certain liberties with those busts such as taking money and drugs. Some were deeper into it than others but none were clean.

When Ciello grew a conscience and decided it was time to go straight, he started working for the State Attorney General and gathering mountains of evidence against mobsters and cops alike. The problem with cleaning up after immersing yourself in dirt is that there is no easy way out. He began to burn down the very mixture of underworld and cop world that made him.

This was an intense movie that was so multi-faceted. There were government men from every walk of life that wanted what Ciello was providing, all the while he's trying to bust certain bad guys while keeping other crooks clean. The more he helps the government the more his world constricts around him until he's suffocating. His moves begin to hurt more than just those he's targeting and there's nothing he can do to control any of it.

This is a long movie that is so well done. It is Scorcese or Copolla-esque. The cast is fantastic, the production itself is grand, and the script is magnifique.

Three hours of Treat Williams overacting might not sound like the best way to spend an evening, but good material paired with Sidney Lumet's characteristically dynamic direction manage to balance Williams' weaknesses as an actor. The result is a very good movie from the early 80s that feels like it should have been made in the 70s, and presages the slew of gritty cop dramas that would proliferate the marketplace throughout the rest of the decade and beyond.

The film is a mash up of two of Lumet's favorite genres: the urban crime drama and the courtroom thriller. Williams plays a cop who agrees to work with the U.S. government on exposing corruption within the New York justice system, and then watches everything fall down around him as the very people he's agreed to help turn on him. It's a terse, energetic movie, and though I don't know that it needed to be three hours long, I didn't really feel its length while watching it.

There are a whole bunch of character actors in it that are much better than Williams: Jerry Orbach, as one of Williams' best cop buddies, and Lindsay Crouse, as his realistic wife who has little patience for his conscience, are two standouts in a movie that has something like 100+ speaking roles.

Sidney Lumet and Jay Presson Allen (the woman who wrote the Oscar-nominated script to "Cabaret") were nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, but "Prince of the City" got no other love from the Academy, despite being better than the film that won that year's Oscar, "Chariots of Fire."

Grade: A-

In Lumet's earlier work, Serpico, Frankie went through little in the way of a crisis of conscience. His fellow cops were corrupt bullies, comic Paisanos, sadistic goons, or real mean mothers. Serpico was an immensely popular movie for a number of good reasons, including the fact that it was a story of good guys against bad. Prince of the City is by no means as simple as that. It's far more demanding of the viewer and, in that sense, a better story. Once you join a secret organization -- the Mafia, the NSC, the NYPD -- you learn that the rules don't always follow the guide book's. The difference between theory and practice is much greater in practice than in theory. Inevitably, there must be slippage between the ideal and the real. Shortcuts are developed, corners rounded, edges softened. The world outside this cocoon of secrecy doesn't know about the slippage, except in rare instances in which it's squeezed out into public view, such as the defense presentation in the O. J. Simpson trial.

Cielo brings himself, recklessly, almost hysterically, through a tentacular process, to rat one by one on the only people he truly can trust and who reciprocate that trust. They are not only his partners but his closest friends. When he almost breaks down from guilt at a backyard party, they take him aside and offer support, money, understanding, as much love as one tough cop can express for another. But it hardly helps. As he tells them, he's seeking absolution, perhaps a bit wistfully preoccupied with achieving what his last name implies. He blows the whistle while he is still an integrated, respected, even honored member of the organization, first on small fry, then people he's bonded with. As he says to the federal investigators for whom he is acting as informant, "The cops care more about me than you guys do." (He's right, too. Other cops save his bacon more than once while the feds are providing a dismal simulacrum of back-up.)

These feds as we first meet them are represented by an interesting trio. The first one that Danny contacts (not the other way around) is patient, quiet, thoughtful, steepling his fingers before his face and waiting patiently while Danny works out his own justification for his betrayal, a kind of psychiatric fed. The second is the closest we come to a bad guy; his background includes Andover and Harvard and he has the inexpressive face of the FBI agents in Dog Day Afternoon. We know just by looking at him that he is the kind of guy who lives on Central Park West instead of Queens, the kind of guy cops hate, and Danny tells him so up front. He's the reason that cops feed heroin to their junkie snitches, and why they resentfully skim money off narcotics takes. He turns out to be not unsympathetic; it's okay to go to Harvard, I guess. The third, Bob Balaban, we meet last. He's in charge, a prissy, clipped instrument of distant authority. The feds not only provide inadequate protection, but when Danny feels he has gone as far as he morally can in his cooperation, they pat him on the back, assure him that we're all on the same side here, you know, and then coerce him into further betrayals with threats of perjury. When they're through with him they don't discard him, they do everything in their power to pin the French Connection debacle on him. When that doesn't work they bring up a junkie's payoff of four hundred dollars that some cop may have taken years ago. As Danny says, they'd get you for bad breath if they could. Not only does Danny lose his best friends but his family turns against him as well. His cousin Nick is whacked for warning Danny that a contract is out on him. Nick's family won't allow a drunken Danny into the funeral home. Serpico certainly suffered but he didn't go through anything like this torture.

The lengthy narrative involves many characters and a good deal of intrigue and is sometimes hard to follow, which I take as a measure of verisimilitude. There are no car chases, no shoot outs, and no slow-motion violence. No violence at all.

Treat Williams as Danny is an underused actor. Perhaps the reason he never became a major star is the very trait that makes him so effective in this role: a determined set of masculine features undermined by a weak voice that suggests an almost feminine vulnerability. His suicidal impulses are made believable. This is his best performance. Lindsay Crouse as Danny's wife has not much to do, but nobody is better than she at gradually allowing her face to melt from a smile into an expression of dismayed disbelief. His partners, whom he sends over, including Jerry Orbach, are more than adequate for their parts, hard-nosed but sensitive cops with families, who only reluctantly can allow themselves to believe that Danny is guilty of what no cop would do to another, turning over his partners. Nailed, two of them eat their guns, which doesn't help Danny's spiritual predicament.

This story doesn't end with the protagonist's bittersweet success. Serpico's story was sad, as was Terry Malloy's in On the Waterfront, but Danny's is tragic. In the end this isn't about one good cop in a barrel of rotten ones. It more resembles a quest for redemption by means of a penance so intense as to amount of self flagellation, teetering at times on the brink of suicide. Danny destroys the real world around him and in the process, like Sampson, destroys himself because if we are not after all a part of the things and people we love, and they a part of us, then what are we?