Al Pacino is going to star in two films at the Toronto International Film Festival, Manglehorn and The Humbling. Now would be a good time to recall that he’s one of the best actors of his generation.
Al Pacino refuses to be quiet. Whether he’s playing shy guys, working stills, cops, cartoon villains, or Satan himself, Pacino slunk unto the screen with a burning intensity that few of his peers could match. Pacino possesses large, sad eyes which give them impression that he’s disappointed with the world, a subtle scowl indicating that he just may be withdrawing in disgust, but also a strangely empathetic gait, giving him an ineffably brotherly quality. Pacino specializes in playing hard cases and badasses, but he is so much more than that. He is the sympathetic villain, the put-upon everyman, and the working class hero all rolled into one.
Pacino ascended during the diverse and rich 1970s, a rich, diverse, and magical time for American film. Only during the 1970s could someone like Al Pacino become a movie star. This was a time of grounded, cynical dramas, and a nouveau wave of bratty film-school-raised filmmakers began infiltrating the marketplace. Audiences didn’t want the frothy artificiality of previous generations. They wanted something grounded and real. The contemporary filmmakers responded by porting over the dominant filmmaking aesthetic of the French New Wave, and began casting actors who were to be known more for their bitterness, intensity, and dramatic strengths, rather than for their glittering, square-jawed movie star qualities.
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Al Pacino was not ever supposed to be a handsome leading man. Pacino was always supposed to be the twitchy guy, the unsure guy, the mean guy, the angry guy. His ability to remain casual in the face of some of the most bleak and revolutionary dramas of an entire decade marked him as an unmovable talent in the 1970s. His portrayal of the angry, evil, drug-addicted crime lord Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake of Scarface also codified him as being capable of over-the-top villainy and ceaseless energy. By the 1990s, he had graduated to elder statesman status, capturing and commanding attention just by stepping on the screen.
There are four phases to Al Pacino’s career. There are the early days of playing sympathetic little men with problems the world wouldn’t let him solve. There was the middle period, beginning perhaps with Dick Tracy, when he was a legitimate movie star, and was fully comfortable with himself as a performer, allowing himself to stretch and perform in odder roles, while still banking on his now-established reputation. The third phase is a mixed bag, wherein Pacino has been selecting some films of dubious quality (I’m thinking of widely-panned movies like 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill). And then there is the little-seen side phase of Al Pacino, the stage thespian.
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Lest it be forgotten, Pacino is – and has always been – an actor’s actor. He takes his craft very seriously. This is a man who does what comes naturally, but doesn’t rely on naturalism and charm to carry a role. This man delves deep. It’s Pacino’s willingness to express that intensity that leaves him such a powerful presence in our minds.
Sure, he can get goofy and screamy from time to time (starting with Dick Tracy, you might notice that Pacino started screaming with a distressing and increasing frequency), but watching such an intense actor cutting loose and hamming it up is most certainly a great pleasure. Has Pacino become a ham in recent years? In some of his films, certainly. I think that a lot of his hammier stuff, however, can be traced to his sense of humor. Pacino can be funny. Although I wouldn’t consider it an essential role, I nonetheless encourage you to find Andrew Niccol’s underrated sci-fi comedy Simone. Pacino, who plays the mastermind behind a secretly virtual, computer-generated star actress is perhaps as funny as he’s ever been. Yes, I openly recommend Simone.
It’s hard to winnow down a list of Pacino’s greatest performances because he gave us so many. But winnow I shall. Al Pacino’s crazy intensity cannot be absorbed all at once, so I recommend that you trek slowly through the following films in chronological order, seeing him evolve, grow, and become more and more comfortable as his career went on.
Slideshow: The Essential Al Pacino: 17 Must-See Films
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
The Essential Al Pacino
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The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Perhaps one of the most depressing romances to come out of the depressing 1970s, Jerry Schazberg's The Panic in Needle Park sees a young Pacino, then only 30, playing a desperate heroin addict who manages to barely hold onto a relationship with the homeless Kitty Winn, who also eventually becomes a heroin addict. The film is bleak, and only possesses small scraps of redemption around the edges, often wallowing in steely, drug-addicted filth. Pacino was certainly not looking to play it safe early in his career.
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The Godfather, Parts I and II (1972, 1974)
I'm not sure if I can add anything to Francis Ford Coppola's enduring crime classic The Godfather that hasn't already been iterated endlessly by passionate film professors and frothing neo-cinephiles. I will say this: Pacino, as the corruptible Michael Corleone, saw that The Godfather movies were not mere crime stories, but near-operatic tragedies of Shakespearean proportions. This was not just a tale of crime and the dark mirror of the American dream, but a soulful story of what it looks like when a good person saunters vaguely into evil.
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Serpico (1973)
The Godfather instantly codified Pacino as a gangster, but Sidney Lumet's Serpico proved that he could be warm as well. Well, at least relatively so. In Serpico, Pacino plays the title character, a real-life honest cop who blew the whistle on rampant police corruption. This may seem twisted, but I see Serpico as a Dickensian character, one who lives in a corrupt world, and is just too good-hearted to let it get to him. This was still the 1970s, however, so his honesty had a price.
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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Quite possibly Pacino's finest moment, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, also based on a true story, was the first time Pacino had been quite this complex. If you haven't seen Dog Day Afternoon, it's exhilarating. Pacino plays Sonny, a desperate man who resolves to hold up a bank. Revealed in fits, we eventually learn why Sonny needs the money, his relationship with his wife, and the relationship he has with a mysterious Chris Sarandon. Pacino is always vulnerable, and yet always in charge. People like him, and we can see why. I could write several pages just on Pacino's performance in Dog Day Afternoon.
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Cruising (1980)
Often called one of the worst movies of all time, William Friedkin's campy, oft-offensive, easily mockable Cruising is most certainly a curio from an earlier time. In Cruising, Pacino plays an undercover cop who must infiltrate the underground gay New York S&M scene. The film sought to blow the lid off of gay culture, and present it earnestly for the first time, but the film often reads as naïve and silly. Pacino, however, gives his all in a daring film that lesser actors would perhaps have shied away from.
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Scarface (1983)
De Palma's Scarface is often said to contain Pacino's best work, and it is most certainly his most iconic. When one thinks of Pacino, they typically think of Tony Montana, the ambitious completely amoral Cuban who wanted nothing more than untold wealth, sexual hedonism, buckets and buckets of cocaine, and total impunity from any and all laws of the land or of common decency. Despite being a hideous monster, Tony Montana is undeniably fun. Pacino swings for the fucking walls, and smashes everything to pieces – literally and figuratively – in Scarface.
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Dick Tracy (1990)
Al Pacino played a cartoonish villain in Scarface, so why not let him play an actual cartoon character in Warren Beatty's impressively realized Dick Tracy? Wearing a restrictive suit and some unusual facial prosthetics, Pacino took the broad role of Big Boy Caprice and somehow out-acted the makeup. He was not looking to make a complex, down-to-earth character out of Big Boy. Pacino was trying to embody the bold, over-the-top nature of a comic book. And he succeeded with flying colors.
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Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
David Mamet's play about desperate salesmen seems like a natural fit for Pacino. Pacino was best when he was seen fraying under pressure, and throwing him in the pressure cooker of nearly-fired salesmen, all spewing out Mamet's trademark scattershot dialogue, certainly shows him at his best. Ironically, Pacino plays the calmest and most confident salesman of the bunch, who seems to passionately know where to go, how to express himself, and how to make a sale. Morality be damned. His monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the best in his career.
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Scent of a Woman (1992)
Hoo-ah! By the time Martin Brest's film Scent of a Woman was released, Pacino was already seen as one of the strongest acting forces in Hollywood. Casting Pacino was a boon. As such, we could see that Pacino was becoming more comfortable with roles that indicated his legend, and yet still addressed his vulnerability. In Scent of a Woman, Pacino plays a retired blind Army colonel who requires help – and certainly no pity – from a shamed prep student. The two manage to bond, and Pacino gets to slowly reveal not just his anger, but his exhilaration on recapturing some of what he used to have as a sighted person.
It also inspired one of the best spoofs in the 1990s cartoon series The Critic. Scent of a Wolfman.
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Carlito's Way (1993)
Although Pacino gives a great performance in De Palma's Carlito's Way – a film about a Puerto Rican ex-con who is trying, and often failing, to go straight – it's easy to see it as a metaphor for Pacino's own career. Here is a man trying to do something honest, and the people around him keep expecting him to be a criminal. Sounds like Pacino was still living in the shadow of Tony Montana. It's fitting that De Palma should be the one to help Pacino shake off that stigma with another go-round of crime and redemption.
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Heat (1995)
Pacino's quiet intensity had somewhat fallen by the wayside in the 1990s, but you can see Michael Mann trying to bring some of it back in the steely, cold, procedural crime epic Heat. Pacino plays a no-nonsense cop, and Robert De Niro plays the no-nonsense crook he is constantly pursuing. Although Pacino has some good laugh lines in the film (“She's got a great ass!”) he mostly comes across as hard and focused and professional. What could have been a mechanical performance from a lesser actor becomes more interesting in Pacino's hands. We know what simmers behind those eyes.
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Looking for Richard (1996)
If you've ever been interested in Al Pacino's stage craft, be sure not to miss the documentary Looking for Richard, which Pacino also directed. I'm a big, big Shakespeare fan (who isn't, really?) and it is an unending pleasure to watch one of the best actors of his generation ruminate on and performs scenes from Shakespeare's dark history Richard III. The film is part performance piece, part lecture, and all intellectually awesome.
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The Devil's Advocate (1997)
His campiest performance since Scarface. In The Devil's Advocate, Pacino pulls out all the stops to play someone even more evil than Tony Montana... namely, Satan himself. Taylor Hackford's thriller is not as deep as it thinks it is – perhaps being hampered by an odd performance from Keanu Reeves – but it's still a fun philosophical and ethical playhouse of bizarre satanic premonitions, sleazy sexuality, and some of the most exquisite overacting from Pacino himself. If you're going to play Satan, you'd better make him larger than life.
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The Insider (1999)
Reteaming with Michael Mann allowed Pacino to stand opposite an equally intense rising star named Russell Crowe. The steely quietude of The Insider allows the two men to complement one another, and reflect on one another, more than I think Pacino has done with any co-star before or since. No, not even with De Niro. The Insider tells the true story of a whistle blower named Jeffrey Wigand who uncovered malfeasance in the cigarette industry. Pacino played the star reporter who knew how to mete out that information, and who becomes implicated by Big Tobacco alongside his charge.
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Any Given Sunday (1999)
I once called Any Given Sunday the best of all football movies, and I stand by that statement. Director Oliver Stone clearly sought to end the genre by including any and all previously-known football clichés, but somehow making it a dynamic and modern tale of modern football. Pacino plays the central figure in the film, a beleaguered coach who is trying to hang onto tradition, but who has to face down stern owners and a changing ethos. Pacino has never been more fatherly than in Any Given Sunday. He smiles. He is warm. He seems approachable for the first time.
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The Merchant of Venice (2004)
Michael Radford's 2004 production of The Merchant of Venice is – as some critics have said – a somewhat limp production of Shakespeare's famously problematic play, and didn't quite manage to suss out some of the play's more bizarre elements (characters in drag, oddly arranged posthumous marriage demands), but it did finally manage to turn Shylock – part sympathetic and part monstrous – into a wholly realized and human character. Pacino tackles the sticky role with passion and humanity. "Hath not a Jew eyes? If you wrong us, will we not revenge?" Pacino doesn't merely recite. He delves. That's hugely admirable.
