Within moments of this film’s beginning, its subject describes in terrifying detail a crime that took place on a passenger train carrying American servicemen like himself in wartime India—the first taste of this biography’s probing complexity. He had done nothing about this crime he witnessed when he was a young soldier in 1943, Sidney Lumet tells his interviewer—a subject he returns to near the film’s end. He had thought to try, to interfere. But he could not, he knew, without losing his life. And so the event had haunted him through the years—an act of incomprehensible brutality committed by ordinary people.  The director of “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Prince of the City” and “The Verdict” was not surprisingly a man concerned with moral complexity. One, also, whose attitudes mirrored those of the world that had formed him. There, talking to the police was not popular—“in my bringing-up, a rat is a rat”—which fact caused him to feel ambivalence about the lead character of his film “Prince of the City” (1981), based on the actual story of police lieutenant Robert Leuci, who had collected and revealed evidence of police corruption in New York City. He wasn’t quite certain how he felt about this character, Lumet says, until he had seen the rushes and realized that he had made a hero of him.  In the Lower East Side immigrant world that formed him, no one had money—but young Sidney Lumet, whose father acted in Yiddish theater, managed to become a regular earner as a child actor. He had, he says in this interview filmed in 2008 (three years before his death), perhaps acquired his taste for the operatic evident in some of his work by hearing “Madame Butterfly” sung in Yiddish.  Lumet made his early career as a director of television shows in the 1950s, among them the impressive “You Are There” series, a product of CBS News—a clip of which the film provides, with anchor Walter Cronkite, in classic form, crisply announcing that we were about to be taken to the trial of Socrates.  Next to the character of its subject and the story he tells, nothing in this film by Nancy Buirski is more riveting than its abundance of clips from Lumet movies, usually the best scenes and all the more seductive in this context. Not that Paul Newman ’s final address to the jury in “The Verdict” (1982)—in his role as the ambulance-chasing attorney who has recovered his sense of purpose though his determined effort to win justice for a client—ever needed any improving on. Here it is again, smashing as ever. So are scenes from the memorable if didactic “12 Angry Men” (1957), about a jury swayed by a single man of conscience: a film whose cast included, in addition to star Henry Fonda, some of the nation’s best-known and future best-known character actors— Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam and E.G. Marshall among them.  He never deliberately set out to deliver a particular social message or call for justice in his films, Lumet asserts—that drive, he maintains, came from his unconscious. Still, in filming “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) he was above all determined that the main character in the story emerge as a sympathetic figure. The movie was based on the real-life case of a married Vietnam War veteran with a taste for extramarital sex with men, who tried to rob a bank to finance a sex-change operation for his boyfriend. He didn’t want somebody in the balcony of a movie theater shouting “hey you fags!” at the screen, Lumet recalls, and in this effort at humanizing the character the film had succeeded, thanks to Al Pacino ’s performance.  Like other filmmakers, Lumet had had encounters with the political terrors of the 1950s, been fingered—falsely—in the American Legion Magazine as having attended Communist meetings. Under threats that the sponsors of one of his shows might be forced to drop him, he agreed to meet with the accusers—who quickly backed down. But walking to the meeting, he had felt the full force of the threat that confronted anyone accused—not only would you lose the job you had, you wouldn’t work anywhere, your career was over. From that experience, he had come to understand how some in Hollywood had ended up cooperating with investigators and giving them names. A characteristically blunt assessment of reality—a kind of which this portrait is full, as it is of warmth and wit.
A PBS profile of the director of such films as ‘12 Angry Men,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Network’