Serpico movie poster, titles, soundtrack album cover

“Many of his fellow officers considered him the most dangerous man alive—an honest cop.”

Serpico is a 1973 American biographical crime film starring Al Pacino. It’s based on the book by Peter Maas and was directed by Sidney Lumet.

IMP Awards credits this poster to the advertising firm Diener-Hauser (a.k.a. Diener Hauser Bates), and it was possibly designed by Paul Crifo. Ed Benguiat says in this 2000 talk (01:06:44) he created the title/logo itself, using “just a plain typeface.” This typeface appears to be Cadence as shown in Lettergraphics’ 1976 catalog, horizontally expanded. Castcraft’s Encyclopedia of Phototype Styles from 1978 shows the same face with the alias Marcher.

Ed Benguiat was the art director of Photo-Lettering, Inc., a New York-based competitor of Lettergraphics in California and Castcraft in Chicago. PLINC had a similar design in their own library, Pacella Decatur, but several of its letterforms including E L R require modifications to match the movie logo, which would be inconsistent with Benguiat’s statement. [edit: Cadence is credited to Ray Cruz in a catalog by Schaedler. PLINC had closer ties to this type studio in New York, at least they carried some of their designs, like Loose New Roman and Cucumber.].

The small type is set in Eurostile. Judging from the top of t, the tagline seems to be in a phototype version of Venus Extended (dreiviertelfett?). Digital approximations include Vonness Expanded (Font Bureau, 2007) and Venusian Bold Extended (Wooden Type Fonts, 2018).