... AND JUSTICE FOR ALL; DIRECTOR SIDNEY LUMET REVISITS LAW ENFORCEMENT IN `NIGHT FALLS' : `IT'S THE WORK'.

Byline: Henry Sheenan Orange County Register

On Friday, Sidney Lumet's 40th film, ``Night Falls on Manhattan,'' opens - a nice coincidence since this also marks his 40th year as a movie director.

As has so often been the case, ``Night Falls'' is the story of people in law enforcement. In particular, it's the story of a young assistant district attorney, played by Andy Garcia, thrust into a position of great power largely through circumstance.

But power becomes a burden when he ends up pursuing a police corruption case that may involve not just old friends - he's a former cop himself - but his veteran detective father, played by Ian Holm.

Lumet and his cameras have spent time in courtrooms, police stations and crime sites from his very first feature, ``Twelve Angry Men.'' And while he's made movies with other settings, it's cop and courtroom dramas such as ``Serpico,'' ``Dog Day Afternoon'' and ``The Verdict'' that seem to be most associated with the 72-year-old filmmaker.

``I don't pick anything with an objective in view,'' Lumet says when asked about his predilection for films about law enforcement. ``Now, obviously, when I look back and I see, `My God, there's this, there's `Q & A,' there's `Prince of the City,' ... obviously I'm involved with the justice system - whatever that means - to an enormous degree.

``That's the material that attracts me. I cannot tell you why; I don't know. I just know that I react instinctively.''

Given how Lumet mostly works - on location in New York City whenever possible - it's inevitable that he has contact with law enforcement at the personal and institutional levels. And given that a good percentage of his cops are involved in corruption, it might seem that those contacts might be a bit roiled.

But, contrary to expectations, Lumet characterizes his relationships with the police as ``very good.''

``We're assigned two patrolmen to be with us to help with traffic and crowds and what-have-you,'' he explains. ``Over the years, because I've done so many pictures, some of them have become friends. And the thing they like is that their dilemma is constantly up there on the screen, realistically.

``What they hate is doing that,'' Lumet says, miming shoot-'em-up-style heroics. ``That's what they hate.''

Lumet recalls a specific incident from ``Prince of the City,'' the based-on-fact story of a New York police detective who ended up exposing corruption in his own squad. One day the real-life detective was on the set watching Treat Williams play him.

``One of the biggest laughs I ever got was when Treat has to pull a gun on a guy and his hands are shaking. Now, only something like 5 percent of cops ever fire a shot in anger their whole career. They're scared to death; they're just like us. Bob Lucey had about 12 of his fellow detectives, probably from the same dirty gang he'd been in, to watch the movie, and they roared with laughter. What they were laughing at was the realism, that someone knew what they were going through.''

It's not just cops who take a liking to Lumet. One of the hallmarks of his career has been his ability to attract big-name stars (Paul Newman and Al Pacino, among many others) to the kind of projects they are supposed to shun.

In fact, it's this knack that may partially account for Lumet's career longevity.

``They know that I'm trustworthy,'' Lumet explains. ``I have no tricks, I'm not their analyst, I don't want to be their father ... It's the work with me.

``I give them choices: `This is this kind of scene we need, we're not getting it yet, is there something here you don't want us to see?' Good acting is self-revelation, and their `selves' are the only instrument they've got. If they choose not to show it, that's their affair. If the picture suffers for it, that's my fault for having cast them.''

For Lumet, the craft of acting is more than just his vocation; it's his life.

The son of Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, stalwarts of the Yiddish stage, Lumet had made it to Broadway long before his teens, including appearances in classics such as ``Dead End.'' He was acting and teaching acting when he went to work as a director for CBS in 1950, the prologue to his movie career.

``I was a kid actor,'' Lumet says. ``When I was growing up and acting up on Broadway, we were snobs. Movies were for making money; the theater was art. As I started becoming involved first in television and then in movies, I knew I was saying good-bye to one thing and hello to something else.

``The theater takes tremendous devotion; it's a terrible way to live. Being an actor is not just collecting $20 million, like Jim Carrey does.''

And, Lumet, says, it's a source of huge tension. Married four times himself, he points out that the loyalties demanded by the theater, at the cost of a personal life, are similar to that of his much-observed cops. At some point, theater people and cops often have to choose between home and profession.

``It's usually the profession, and that includes cops,'' Lumet says. ``You know, they have the highest divorce rate of any profession. One of the fascinating things is that when women started to be put on the force, there were tremendous demonstrations by the wives of the policemen. Because they knew what the relationships with male partners had been; riding around in a car all day with a female partner, what do you think is going to happen?

``What's also interesting about the divorce rate is that enormous numbers of cops are Catholic. So when you think of those people winding up with that rate of divorce, it tells you a lot.''

The release of Lumet's latest film is, sadly, not just a cause for celebration.

The year 1957 marked not only his own movie debut, but also that of four colleagues from New York live TV: Martin Ritt, Arthur Penn, Robert Mulligan and John Frankenheimer. All of them favored stories of what used to be called ``the common man,'' a definition several of them purposefully filled out to include women. They preferred locations to studios, realism to artifice, recognizable human dilemmas to genre convention.

Ritt died six years ago, Frankenheimer has given himself largely to commercial projects, and Penn and Mulligan have difficulty working at all. How has Lumet persevered?

``I don't know,'' he answers. ``I've got a kind of stubbornness. Behaving well to me means doing the kind of movie I care about. That doesn't mean I haven't done movies for dough; I have. When I wanted to buy a summer house, I did a movie. But it means also keeping your eye on the total. Sure, I'm upset by failure, but I'm not devastated by failure. The other side of that is I'm not elated by success, so I don't get spoiled.''

Lumet agrees, though, that when he goes, so will the style of filmmaking championed by him and his class of '57 peers.

``I want the audience to work with me,'' he says. ``I don't want to present them with something that takes no effort from them. That may go, because I don't know that the audience's attention span is there anymore. ...

``Largely from television, everything has been given to them. That does concern me, in the sense that I hate to see it go. I think it's better work that way, and I think it's finally showing the audience a great deal of respect. But I agree with you, I think it's an endangered species.''

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Photo: ``Obviously I'm involved with the justice system - whatever that means - to an enormous degree. That's the material that attracts me. I cannot tell you why; I don't know. I just know that I react instinctively,'' says Sidney Lumet, right, directing Andy Garcia on the set of ``Night Falls on Manhattan.''