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Sidney Lumet Still Revels in That Gritty, Gotham Feel of Old

How old Sidney Lumet?

Old Sidney Lumet, 81, fine, thank you very much.

Old Sidney Lumet so fine, in fact, that after nearly 60 years in the game of directing and producing (first job in 1948), he's got a new movie opening tomorrow, in very much the Sidney Lumet tradition.

It's "Find Me Guilty," classic Lumet in that it's fast, furiously driven by dialogue, full of bravura performances, set in a New York so real it makes your skin feel gritty, your nostrils fill with taxi toxins and your whole internal ecosystem readjust to the more jangly and confrontational rhythms of the Big Town.

Just like "Prince of the City." Just like "Dog Day Afternoon." Just like "Serpico." Just like "Network." Just like "Q & A." Just like "The Pawnbroker."

Just like "Vitness."

No, not just like "Vitness," which was actually called "A Stranger Among Us," an undercover cop story that is remembered by many, including the director himself, as one of his less great achievements.

"That was my idea of a commercial success," he says with comic rue, telling a story on himself, "Melanie Griffith in the Hasidic community!"

The new picture makes a little more sense: It features Vin Diesel, part-Italian, in the Italian community, or the segment of that community known as the mob.

Diesel, in a hairpiece, 30 extra pounds on his frame, a baggy suit and a breakout performance (another Lumet tradition; he is great with actors, as proved by the 17 Oscars his actors have won), plays Jack "Jackie Dee" DiNorscio, an uneducated, low-ranking mob soldier. DiNorscio, during the longest organized-crime trial in history in the late 1980s, defended himself and tried to derail an ambitious prosecuting attorney's attempts, using racketeering statutes, to put 20 made guys away. Much of the dialogue is derived from actual court records.

So for Lumet it's back almost to where he started, a room in a New York courthouse. His first film was the classic "12 Angry Men," about the tensions let loose in the confines of a jury room where issues of ethics and legality were argued with extremely real stakes. But it's also back to the milieu of professional law enforcement, New York-style, familiar from "Serpico" and "Prince" and "Q & A" and his A&E TV series "100 Centre Street." He's been here before.

His ninth decade on Earth finds the old guy acting surprisingly, er, young. You'd never guess 81; you'd guess 61, a vigorous 61, the kind of 61-year-old that still loves to mix it up, loves to tell stories, loves the past but can laugh about it and is full of hope for the future, for movies yet to be made, for actors yet to be directed ("I've never worked with Meryl Streep!"), for stories yet to be told.