Serpico / Untouchables / Chinatown DVD

Region 2 DVDs

Serpico
Tony Manero (John Travolta) in Saturday Night Fever and Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) in Boogie Nights have one major thing in common: They both have posters of Al Pacino as Serpico on their bedroom walls. As the real-life NYPD detective whose integrity cost him virtually everything (and almost cost him his life), Pacino became one of the icons of gritty, realistic 1970s filmmaking.

The Untouchables
As noted critic Pauline Kael wrote, the 1987 box-office hit The Untouchables is “like an attempt to visualise the public’s collective dream of Chicago gangsters.” In other words, this lavish reworking of the vintage TV series is a rousing potboiler from a bygone era, so beautifully designed and photographed.

Chinatown
Roman Polanski’s brooding film noir exposes the darkest side of the land of sunshine, the Los Angeles of the 1930s, where power is the only currency–and the only real thing worth buying. Jack Nicholson is J.J. Gittes, a private eye in the Chandler mold, who during a routine straying-spouse investigation finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a jigsaw puzzle of clues and corruption. The glamourous Evelyn Mulwray (a dazzling Faye Dunaway ) and her titanic father, Noah Cross (John Huston ), are at the black-hole center of this tale of treachery, incest, and political bribery.