Al Pacino’s hat game in ‘Serpico’ has never been bettered
If you’re lucky enough to be heading to one of the 592 UK music festivals this summer, then I have a very important tip for you: don’t waste time Googling ‘what to wear’, or worse, asking ChatGPT, simply dress exactly like Al Pacino in Serpico, and watch the compliments come rolling in.
Now the advantages of doing this are twofold: firstly, in order to know what I’m talking about, you will have to watch the 1973 Sidney Lumet-directed Serpico, the movie about police corruption starring an Oscar-nominated whistleblower in Al Pacino, which is an amazing film, and secondly, if you follow my advice, you will have assembled the finest collection of bucket hats known to man.
This applies whether you’re a guy, like Pacino, or a girl, or anything else for that matter, because bucket hats have always been in style, other than for a very short period of time in the early 2000s, but that was when people listened to Blue, Enrique Iglesias and Justin Timberlake, so it doesn’t count.
Regardless, the interesting thing about Pacino in Serpico is that he starts off getting sworn in to the NYPD looking very clean-shaven and non-threatening with his biscuit coloured mac and headwear, and then almost scene by scene, what he’s wearing just gets increasingly amazing.
Featuring ponchos, dungarees, military jackets, leather vests, various beards, and the acquisition of an enormous Old English Sheepdog, Pacino’s titular lead character, Detective Frank Serpico, goes through all manner of sartorial transformations, presumably to show the passing of time or the fact that he often works undercover.
But to be honest, most of it seems to be the actor, who at that point was probably the best in the world, simply trying to look cool as fuck as often as possible while telling everyone to call him ‘Paco’ for no discernible reason.
And the hats are the highlight. There’s a white one that looks like a fancy plant pot (which you can still buy now if you’ve got 65 quid spare), a green one that makes him look like a garden gnome, a couple of woollen beanies, a straw fishing hat, all sorts.
Together with his Greenwich Village apartment, his predilection for fine wines and his pairing up with two of the most beautiful women anyone saw on screen at any point in the 1970s, the man is a walking advert for becoming a cop who investigates other cops, other than the thorny issue of the constant fear of being horribly killed.
Even aside from the hats, there’s plenty of festival-ready gear Serpico has for you to steal, including Aviator sunglasses, heavy-duty overshirts, Clark’s Wallabes and baggy denim jeans; you can pretty much copy him entirely through the duration of the film and you’ll look the business, just make sure you don’t (spoiler alert) also get shot through a doorway and very nearly die while your colleagues who you’ve made hate you look the other way.
As I said at the start, though, even if you don’t nick any of Pacino’s outfits this summer, you’ll still have seen a cracking New Hollywood thriller, one of the best in fact. Sidney Lumet basically didn’t make bad movies at all, and when he paired up with Pacino, like with this and Dog Day Afternoon, genuine magic happened.
At least get one of the bucket hats.
