Al Pacino has a reputation for difficulty. He clashed with director Norman Jewison on And Justice for All (1979) after he asked for a reshoot of the film’s climactic courtroom scene. He did the same on The Godfather Part II (1974) because another actor did something in a take which his character, Michael Corleone, hadn’t reacted to. And on Dog Day Afternoon (1975), he asked director Sidney Lumet for a reshoot of the entire first day of shooting after watching rushes and realising he had got it wrong, the character wasn’t there. He spent an evening mulling it over and the next morning reshot the scene without the glasses he’d been wearing. His bank robber, Sonny, had to be a performer, Pacino realised—highly-strung, dishevelled, revving up the crowd outside the bank (“Attica! Attica!”) and clowning for the TV cameras, like a Shakespearean player strutting the proscenium. As he tells his confederate Sal (John Cazale), “We’re entertainment.”
Except “difficulty” here is code for “Olympian-level brilliance”. Pacino’s performance in Dog Day Afternoon capped an astonishing run of four films in four years, each earning him an Oscar nomination—The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1973), The Godfather: Part II and Dog Day Afternoon itself—arguably the best any actor has been on this side of Cary Grant’s run of The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and Gunga Din in the late 1930s. More soulful than De Niro, more versatile than Ford or Hanks, Pacino can, with some credibility, be claimed as America’s greatest living screen actor.
What makes him so memorable? Well, to begin with there’s that’s voice, gravelly and sonorous, that he can swell like a Bronx bullhorn to level an entire courtroom, as he does at the climax And Justice for All (“You’re outta order! You’re outta order! This whole trial is outta order!”) which won him his fifth Oscar nomination, as well as nominations for the film’s screenwriters, Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson. Nobody can deliver a speech like Pacino. Speaking with a slight lisp that rolls his “r”s and a deliberately lowered palette that allows his plosives—“p”, “b”—to pop, Pacino creates a steady drumbeat of alliteration in the line, “I’m gonna lie down on my big, beautiful bed at the Waldorf and blow my brains out,” from Scent of a Woman, which finally won him his Oscar, along with screenwriter Bo Goodman. If Pacino’s relationships with directors can be fractious—which may explain why someone like Scorsese was so late to use him—his relations with writers tend to be more harmonious, and the list of great screenwriters he has worked with long: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Zaillian, David Mamet, Paul Attanasio, Richard Price, Tony Gilroy, Heathcote Williams. Oh, and some guy called Shakespeare, although I hear he got creamed on residuals.
Because we see only the end result, we sometimes forget that one of the first things an actor does is read a script: a good actor has first to be a good reader, and Pacino is an excellent one, fully alive to the rhythm and cadence of language. Even when not performing Shakespeare—he has performed Richard III twice, three times if you count his excellent 1996 documentary Looking for Richard—he lends Shakespearean gravitas to characters many miles from Stratford. “Just when I / thought I was / out, they / pull me back / in” is as perfect an example of iambic pentameter as Richard’s “Now is the / Win-ter of our / dis-con-tent”. So too is, “You never / open your / mouth til you / know what the / shot is,” from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). And, “Nicky is a / rat because / Sonny Black / says he’s a / rat,” from Donnie Brasco (1997). Even when not strict iambic pentameter, Pacino’s most memorable lines often fall into a series of straight iambs with an alternating rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables like a heartbeat:
“There’s this / beaut-iful / girl just / fuck-ed me / for-ty / ways from / Sun-day”. (The Devil’s Advocate)
“You do what / you do, / I do what / I gotta do. (Heat, 1995)
“You always / charge a / guy with a / gun. With a / knife you / run.” (The Irishman, 2019)
There’s an additional, lurking rhyme in the latter—“gun”, “run”— which gives it the sound of a pat homily, allowing Pacino to wring an affectionate laugh at Hoffa’s expense.
“[James] Dean was like a sonnet, compact and economical,” writes Pacino in his new memoir Sonny Boy. “Brando was an epic poem.” In which case, Pacino himself is a lyrical ballad, spinning tales of ordinary folk—soldiers, vagrants, convicts, gamblers, thieves—from language salty with vernacular.
Written in collaboration with New York Times journalist David Itzkoff, Sonny Boy contains a vivid, revelatory account of Pacino’s childhood—which was rough, even by the standards of most showbusiness biographies. Abandoned by his father when he was two, Pacino was raised in a series of furnished rentals in Harlem and the South Bronx by a mother with substance-abuse issues who attempted suicide when he was six and overdosed when he was nine, leaving him in the care of his grandparents. Now a father himself, Pacino recounts the expression on the face of his young son one day as they traversed 79th and Broadway, unaccompanied by the boy’s mother. “He was actually looking for her—looking past other people on the street to see if he could find her,” writes Pacino, who often elicits a strong mothering urge in his female friends, including Diane Keaton, whom he dated in the mid-1980s, and Elizabeth Taylor, who, upon hearing that Pacino had hired an assistant, replied, “Good, because that boy needs all the help he can get.” There is a woundedness to some of Pacino’s characters, a strain of lost-boy wistfulness even to his bank robbers, that accounts for some of the affection and even love which they inspire in audiences.
Pacino often elicits a strong mothering urge in his female friends
He was a voracious reader from an early age, poring over cheap editions of Balzac, Flaubert and Chekhov with tiny print on the subway, “amazed at the idea that I could have [their] writing whenever I wanted it.” He and his friends Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, a trio of “wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles”, would roam their stretch of the South Bronx, between Longfellow Avenue and Bryant, from 171st to 174th streets, skating on the ice of the Bronx river, hitching themselves to the backs of buses, jumping the turnstiles at the subway and stealing food, then losing their pursuers atop the tenement rooftops, “like cats”, five stories high. All but Pacino would overdose on drugs. “We are people on the run,” Pacino writes of the acting profession, and his characters’ antennae frequently twitch towards the nearest exit, as when Michael Corleone’s eyes scan the table nervously before he shoots the police captain, McCluskey, in The Godfather—the scene that Coppola moved up in the schedule to convince the Paramount top brass that Pacino should stay in the role.
If the power of a Pacino performance comes from his voice, the subtlety is often to be found in his eyes. He makes only fleeting eye contact with his fellow actors—even before Scent of a Woman, where he played a blind man—his gaze, in close-up, drifting around the screen, allowing the audience alone to witness the crackle of panic or premeditation to be found crossing his face. He has always had a gut instinct for where the camera is. He has the peripheral vision of a deer. When he transferred his production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome from stage to screen, he told his lead actress, Jessica Chastain, “the camera is closer to you than your scene partner. So, just like you know your arm is there, you can forget about it, you have to know that the camera is connected to you and then you can just welcome it.”
The big charge against Pacino is that he is a showboat—too in love with language, with a sweet tooth for a big speech. It’s certainly the puzzle of his career that someone who started with a character as inward as Michael Corleone ended up known for parts as large as his lawyer in The Devil’s Advocate or his cop in Heat, although he reveals that, in the latter film, a crucial scene showing Vincent Hannah chipping cocaine was cut. He admits, somewhat sheepishly, to overacting in Scent of a Woman—“I did go overboard sometimes in that part”—although such admissions seem a concession wrung from him by Itzkoff. Pacino’s love of raising the roof goes back to the Bronx, whose empty streets he used to pace at night, practicing monologues from O’ Neill and Shakespeare to audiences of parked cars. “If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me.” When Pacino “overacts”, he’s returning to his creative happy place. Something of the same desire to dominate the urban environment propels rap, which may be one reason why his portrayal of Tony Montana in Scarface (1983), a performance deliriously drunk on vulgar, vital male energy, was under-appreciated by many until it was picked up by the hip-hop community. After a premiere in Manhattan from which there were walkouts, the cast and their guests retreated to Sardi’s restaurant, sheepish but for Eddie Murphy, who told Pacino, “Al, that was fantastic.”
He spent the first half of his career in a fog of alcohol and low-level alienation
Pacino’s account of his career is less compelling than that of his childhood, if only because he spent the first half of it in a fog of alcohol and low-level alienation from his fellows. He felt “out of place” on The Godfather and spent most of his life without even watching the film in its entirety. He felt “more and more alone and withdrawn” on the second film, as if a “cloud had moved in on me”, and sunk with “pain and depression” shooting Bobby Deerfield (1977). But a vivid thumbnail of Marlon Brando cuts through the fog: on location in a Manhattan hospital bed, eating chicken cacciatore with his hands in bed—“gobble, gobble, gobble”—and wiping his tomato-sauce-smeared hands on the sheets. Is that how movie stars act? There is an equally indelible glimpse of Jackie Kennedy Onassis visiting Pacino in his dressing room after a performance of Richard III; slumped in his chair, he held out his hand for her to kiss. “Why would I ever do that?” he writes, mortified by his solipsism. “Please, what’s wrong with me?” To which the obvious answer would seem to be, “You’re an actor, Al, still high on the fumes of your own grandiloquence.” Even American royalty must bend the knee in the presence of a king.
Sonny Boy is ultimately another winning performance from the actor, who self-deprecatingly calls himself “dumb as a donut” but whose instincts and intuitions run unusually deep, and whose debt to where he is from seems forever unpaid: “My whole life is a moonshot.” If you don’t believe me, let him tell you himself and buy the audiobook. It’s quite a treat to travel the underground, or sit at the bus stop, with Al Pacino in your ear, telling you about the long walks he used to make while trying to figure out how to make that enigma, Michael Corleone, show up on screen. Sometimes his friend and roommate Charlie Sheen would tag along, “like a couple of wayward vagabonds who were practicing for a marathon”.
Pacino’s voice has a lot more growl in it these days, but the music is still as clear as a lark—his “a”s and “e”s as wide as the South Bronx sidewalk, his “r”s rumbling like a train track, his “p”s and “b”s still drumming that unmistakeable beat. You can feel it. He’s still pounding those streets.
