While pretending to capture the air of cynicism and moral defeat that has arisen in the age of Watergate, Hollywood producers have seized on the opportunity to create brutal action epics, devoid of sense or feeling save the kick of violence. Audiences could once turn to the screen for fables of certainty; directors like John Ford obliged them with sagas of just men fighting for a righteous citizenry. Now we are not even asked to lament nostalgic visions of an idealistic America. With-it Hollywood hacks would simply have us snicker at the degradation that seems to be surrounding us.

What is offensive about the new "realistic" cops-and-robbers movies is not that they are (fashionably) nihilistic, but that they are crass and simple-minded. In their world everyone is contemptible, acting solely out of venality or lust. No human institution can be trusted, and the few men able to derive order from society are strong-arm maverick cops.

Most of us were refreshed when the naive American movie myths were gradually revised in the '60's. In Sam Peckinpah's and Arthur Penn's films all social forces were culpable; villains sometimes wore badges and good men could revel in crime. But the mass imitators have not borrowed anything from these men except a violent surface, and have based the content of their films on empty hybrid genres like the spaghetti western. Our movie screens are now replete with dizzying, blood-soaked chaos, apocalyptic visions produced on an assembly-line.

Contrary to ad campaigns and criticism, the makers ofThe Seven-Ups, The Laughing Policeman and Magnum Force do not call for law-and-order. They don't, in fact, have enough time to espouse politics or ideology of any stripe. They're not even interested in plot or drama, only in speed and thump. Their stories are alibis for sensationalistic action, and they re-enact the most heinous crimes out of love for the box office. These films are really B pictures, camouflaged with a smear of realism, padded with car chases and gadgetry to hold their audiences.

Both Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry, and The Seven-Ups, a follow-up to The French Connection, offer mystical explanations for their characters' violence. The heroes never shoot anyone who isn't guilty, although they lack evidence for their target practice; we are asked to believe that they have acute powers of perception unknown to lesser cops.

Lt. Harry Callahan has been criticized for taking the law into his own hands in his first movie. So in gun-toting tyro John Milius's Magnum Force screenplay, Harry is a law abiding liberal--at least in comparison to a uniformed squad of vigilantes, acting under orders of a San Francisco police commissioner. They enjoy killing everyone who is in cahoots with criminals, including innocent party girls. Harry, who still loves his Magnum 44 with the passion Clint Eastwood usually reserves for faithful animals, refuses to go along with them. "Nothing's wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot," says the mild Harry. This statement, along with "I hate the goddamn system, but I'll stick with it until something better comes along," is a constant refrain. Milius must hope that such repetition will coerce us to believe that Harry holds a full-dress trial in his head before he shoots, or that he hates the system for humane reasons.

Eddie Egan, the super-narc who overrode all authority in his attacks on drug traffic in The French Connection, is nowhere in sight in The Seven-Ups. Like the previous film, and Bullitt, this is a Phil D' Antoni production, mindless and numbing. D'Antoni is more careful at limiting his hero's powers in this second-effort: delivering the further exploits of Egan's former partner, Sonny Grosso, he lends Grosso's fictional counterpart, Buddy Mannucci, an institutional weight that Egan lacked. Mannucci heads a special plain-clothes corps aimed at gaining arrests (by unorthodox means) of men wanted for prison terms of seven years and more. Mannucci uses most of his guile and gall to manufacture evidence. But his atavistic instincts are intact when he blackjacks a captured Mafioso senseless, or thrusts a gun under the nose of a loan shark caught in bed.

Despite their crude attempts to throw potential detractors off-guard, Magnum Force's Ted Post and The Seven-Ups' Phil D'Antoni, as well as The Laughing Policeman's Stuart Rosenberg, are interested mainly in zapping their audiences. Force's liberal apologia count for naught when the director's only feeling is for carnage (a man's head getting shorn by a girder, or a pimp choking a whore with Draino). And The Seven-Ups' story of mixed roots in Little Italy--strong Buddy grows up to be a cop, while his weak friend Vito turns crook--is naturalism used to lubricate the gore machine. The Laughing Policeman is most barbarous of all: it primes viewers for two hours of pointless mayhem in the very first scene, when a nameless killer mows down eight strangers on a bus. (If the action slows at other points, Rosenberg tosses in a woman jumping to a splattered sidewalk death or a stoolie's face getting flushed in a urinal).

Hollywood works in artificial extremes. The sticky old westerns or cop movies were based on the assumption that America was full of a spirit of egalitarian community and open land, and that only the aberrant would want to muck things up. The garish new breed of police thrillers tells us that the U.S. drives all its citizens crazy, our cities are virtual insane asylums, and the only objective standard and reforming force is the power of a gun.

The men who made Serpico had a chance to rise above all this. They had a real-life hero: an honest cop who crusaded alone against corruption in the New York City Police Department, despite the physical peril and psychological pressure he suffered at the hands of his fellow policemen. Without wealth or influential contacts, Frank Serpico pushed his case against plainclothesmen on the take so far that it embarassed the Lindsay Administration and helped catalyze the Knapp Commission. His story could have given the lie to the current wave of police epics, and not only dramatized the ugliness of New York City streets and jails, but the possibility of changing our society.

Serpico was convinced that police were the true guardians of society, a secular breed of Jesuits. His one burning hope was to become a good cop; he loved the vigor and ingenuity which the work requires, but above all he wanted to serve the people of his precincts. Even when he discovered that the force was pitted with corruption--that almost the entire plainclothes division raked in protection money from gambling and whorehouses--he refused to let that recognition sink him. He never quit: he took his allegations before a series of Lindsay aides and deputy commissioners and finally broke it to The New York Times. Serpico left the police only after he had already faced the dangers of being a loner on the force and a crusader against the ruling order. He offered public testimony against police (while still recovering from gunshot wounds in the head, incurred in a Harlem narcotics raid); he then sought peace in Switzerland.

Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler follow the structure of the Peter Maas biography. The portrait of the wounded Serpico, being shuttled to a hospital from Harlem, hooks us as the film opens; we then flashback to the highlights of the policeman's career and life. These chart the growth of the man's disillusionment and discontent, as well as the strength of his personal integrity. The film develops with its title character: the derailment of Serpico's life both by those police who were corrupt and those who refused to inflict punishment, carries as much emotional power as the dismantling of bugler Prewitt at the hands of the U.S. infantry.

But apart from the grip of the story and Al Pacino's soulful lead performance, Serpico is superficial, even heartless. The filmmakers have done no original investigations, and accept the reportage of Peter Maas as gospel. In their film, no other cop besides Serpico and an idealistic inspector are at all virtuous; Serpico's Ivy League associate, David Durk, is here preening and pompous, nothing like the dedicated, befuddled naif whom even Maas found sincere. And Lumet, Salt and Wexler never detail the reluctance of police higher-ups to listen to Serpico: New York City and police officials are cardboard figures of mishandled authority. Because the film's view of the force is so sketchy, we get little sense of accomplishment or relief from the formation of the Knapp Commission--which was, after all, the first independent police review board in the history of New York City.

Most damaging of all is that essential human material is skimped. Serpico's honesty, and his appreciation of the diversity of urban life, are scarcely rooted. Lumet lets us glimpse the man's Old World Italian family (his father and brother are cobblers) and his Greenwich Village girlfriends. He creates locker-room comedy out of Serpico's love for opera and ballet. But the crucial gap between his personal life and public service, and the despair that drove him to paranoia and defensive put-ons are only vaguely rendered, like a plainclothesman's arrest sheets.

Serpico is an energetic melodrama, with just enough realistic bite to shine against its current rivals. Its entertainment values hide a sour joke: one of the few heroic stories of our time has been filmed by men who lack their hero's passionate commitment to advance righteous endeavors to the necessary ends.