Serpico
It seems like more than a few seventies movies have lines of dialogue in which girls swoon over Al Pacino. A quick search only revealed the one, the girl in Saturday Night Fever who sighs that she just kissed Al Pacino (is that Fran Drescher with that line?), but I feel like there are more, that he was this big-time sex symbol thirty-odd years ago.
I’ve had that sense for a while, and I never understood it. He’s teeny. He walks like an insulted crab. He spends the bulk of The Godfather wiping his nose, trying to ignite his various simpering love interests with his glare, and fiddling with paperweights while telling Tom Hagen he sucks at his job. Interesting to watch, even when he’s a caricature of himself, sure. He’s compelling.
I didn’t question why he’s revered as an actor, certainly. We mock the HOO-AH now — rightly — but there is a moment when the frantic, desperate HOO-AH drops away and reveals the insupportable sadness that makes the HOO-AH essential to the character’s survival. He does it in the damnedest places, too, sometimes: Dog Day Afternoon, but then also Any Given Sunday.
And if I may take a sidebar, part of what I like about Oliver Stone movies is that, amid all the bombast, the actors kind of have to find their own ways, and that can end up in some unexpected places. It doesn’t go so well for the more limited cast members, but the good actors make hay while the sun shines (and sometimes the Movie Stars™ pull out some cool shit, viz. Tom Cruise in Born on the 4th of July). The scene between Gekko and Darien on the sidewalk in Wall Street is a good example: Daryl Hannah is playing it vaguely and just trying to keep her face in good light, and Michael Douglas is feasting on his lines.
Sidney Lumet also gets really good performances from his actors, but I don’t enjoy his films as much.The pretension isn’t offset as well as Stone’s is, somehow, and they often seem to put outstanding acting against the backdrop a stilted and overlong script: Network (good work by the actors, but I hate Dunaway’s performance and consider the entire movie vastly overrated), The Pawnbroker (great performance, draggy pace), The Morning After (top-notch Fonda but overwrought), and The Verdict (another great performance, this time Newman, strangled in the crib by a weird Lumet/Mamet combo behind the camera).
I do like some Lumet movies, most recently this one, but I wish his editor would sharpen up the knife; Serpico, like several of his others, makes a career-making performance the crown jewel in a pasteboard diadem composed of repetitive scenes (He’s just not going to take the fucking money, guy who worked the grift with Hooker and Luther in The Sting! Find something else to talk about, or kill him, but for God’s sake drop it with the bagman thing!) and simply awful performances by the women in Serpico’s life. The scene in the bathtub where Logs McFlatline The Elder is telling Serpico that she’s going to Texas to get married is amazing: Pacino is nearly perfused with sorrow, and he is beautiful, with the long hair and the wet beard and the big dying eyes. I sat bolt upright and said, “Holy SHIT, Al Pacino,” because he is fantastic in the scene, and he is also wet and naked and has this hair you want to curl up in and he can really wear a pair of hoop earrings.Go find it on YouTube. Watch him becoming a legend in front of you. It’s really cool.
But then his lady friend is soaping his hair and delivering her lines like a supercomputer punch card; she’s so so bad. “I’m so. Sorry. Paco 10010100011.” And then the movie goes on for another two hours, and nothing else really happens, honestly. Serpico stomps around a lot and lets his beard get long and yells at various lieutenants about how he just wants to catch bad guys, and the dirty cops keep harassing him, and having meetings about harassing him, and inviting him to meetings about harassing him to talk about the next meeting at which they will harass him, like, “this one cop wore fringed vests and wouldn’t take bribes” is…not a plot.
But if you’ve ever blown Pacino off as overrated, watch Serpico. Lazy, later in his career? I’ll cosign that. Too yelly sometimes? Yes. Overrated? No. And Lumet is, in general, a bit overrated in terms of the quality of his product, but when it comes to getting performances like that out of his cast, he’s one of the best. Grandpa just needs to shoot for 90 minutes more often so the movies overall aren’t so flabby.
Tags: Al Pacino Daryl Hannah David Mamet Faye Dunaway Fran Drescher It's Log Jane Fonda legendary facial hair movies Oliver Stone overrated! Paul Newman Sidney Lumet Tom Cruise
Well now I’ll put ‘Serpico’ at the top of my Netflix. I used to love Pacino, but then “The Devil’s Advocate” and “Heat” came out, and… meh. Too much scenery chewing in those.
Next up for Pacino is a turn as Jack Kevorkian. Sit there and let that sink in.
Not to be missed, is what that is.
My favorite AP turn? His examination of Shakespeare in Looking for Richard. Unlikely, fascinating.
What is HOO-AH?
@Katie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105323/quotes
I dunno, Pacino in The Godfather is … pretty foxy. He’s got this barely contained animalistic rage and his steely gaze … I remember watching those movies for the first time with my grandmother one summer all, WHO IS THAT GUY? (My excuse: I was 13.)
I was never a Pacino fan until I saw his work in Angels in America. Yes, it is a role that gives an actor a LOT to play with, but there was an edge to his performance that I had not seen in previous stage versions.
fell hard for little Al in “Serpico” back in the day
lately? I avoid even trailers about his movies (and they’re movies now, not films)
second Attica’s suggestion about “Looking for Richard” both for AP and for the inadvertently hilarious Winona Ryder trying to make sense of the role of Lady Anne
but go watch “Angels in America”, AP pulls off a wonderful (if there is such a thing) Roy Cohn
Pacino never had good looks, but I always thought he had charisma. Haven’t seen Serpico though.
Yes yes yesyesyes…that scene you describe with the big dying eyes, omg yes. My knees went weak and I was sitting down. I graduated high school the same year this came out, and it was the darkest, most gritty, depressing and real thing I’d ever seen. So beautiful, so doomed, such injustice. How could my 17-y-o self NOT fall in love with the guy?
(Full of gems, Sars, as always. “I’m so. Sorry. Paco 10010100011.” made me nose my soda.)
@attica, I loved his Richard III but can never, ever forgive him for casting Winona Ryder as Lady Anne. Jesus, it was like watching a cardboard cutout herky-jerky around on stage, but because she so clearly had absoutely no idea what she was doing it was just embarrassing and difficult to watch, rather than any kind of “so bad it’s good” salvagability. I adore that scene between the two characters and seeing it folded, spindled and mutilated hurt me deep down.
This reminds me of my journey of discovering why Robert Redford is such a “thing” for some people. When I became aware of him, he was older, craggy faced, and frankly not that special.
It took seeing The Natural and then later seeing The Great Gatsby to make me understand where these swooners were coming from. Maybe it was just the fancy period costuming and the fuzzy, fantasy lighting, but Gatsby had me fanning myself.
Suddenly, I understood.
I’ve also never gotten the Pacino thing…so maybe my old-school hunk research will take me there next!
@attica – I second the Looking For Richard love – what a fascinating movie. I need to rewatch that.
Best movie review ever! I was laughing so hard, I almost became an insulted crab! Thanks!
First time I ever watched “The Godfather” all the way through, I was hip-deep in lurve (okay, ankle-deep) with Pacino. Kept an eye on his other stuff. The HOO-AH? Ain’t playin’ at my house. And then, as Clairezilla said, “The Devil’s Advocate” happened, and the eye-bugging and scary-grinning and general mugging-by-mugging happened along with it, and all that piled on top of Keanu Reeves’s general awfulness just turned me off Pacino in a cataclysmic way.
All that said, there might need to be some “Serpico” in my life, if the 70s hair and fashion doesn’t trip me up too violently.
@#$$. That’s “don’t”. Subject and verb agree, subject and verb agree you bonehead.
As you were.
Pacino’s never done it for me in the swoon department, but I have shamelessly watched and then loved many of his movies. Heat is, I think, the only movie of considerable length that I’ve viewed more than twice (I have no attention span). I haven’t genuinely liked anything he’s done since then, though, with one exception. A few weeks ago, I finally Netflixed Chinese Coffee and was able to get past the bad directing (Pacino’s) and ill-conceived flashbacks to enjoy Pacino and Jerry Orbach yelling at each other for an hour and a half. I really enjoyed that movie, even though Pacino is totally Late Pacino’ing it up all over the place.
Serpico is one of the few I actually haven’t seen, so I’ll throw that in the queue. Why not? I have no taste in cop films: I’ll watch anything. It can be my fifth Sidney Lumet film, also, since I’ve only seen 12 Angry Men, Network, and Prince of the City. I have Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead waiting for me on Netflix Instant. Schoolwork? What? I can’t hear you.
I’ve totally blocked out Ryder’s even being in LiR. Hee! So, yeah, not memorable. I do remember the turns by Spacey and Alec Baldwin, Yulin, Bryggman and Estelle Awesome Parsons.
I was an adolescent in the seventies, which was the first moment that ‘ethnic’ looking men got to be leading men. So the swoontime of Pacino was part and parcel of that whole gestalt. He didn’t do it for me, but a whole host of my girlfriends viewed my indifference as ‘Good! More AP for me!’
I can (and often have) go off on an unstoppable rant about the travesty that is Scent of a Woman, though. Not enough hate in my handbag to cover that bit of horror.
What I like about Pacino in Serpico is how he, and the film, weren’t afraid to make the character unlikable. Yes, you can agree with his cause (not just in refusing to take graft, but doing honest-to-goodness community police work, and not treating the 60’s culture as a disease to be eradicated), understand why he felt so angry and helpless when all of his cries fell on deaf ears, and still think he was a pain in the ass. If they had made this movie today, Serpico would have been airbrushed clean of any faults.
I’ll have to add Serpico to my Netflix queue, especially if it’ll make me understand the swooning over Pacino in days of yore. The Godfather didn’t quite do it for me, and with Godfather 2 I was too busy swooning over Deniro to notice Pacino.
Pacino rejects the HOO-AH in Donnie Brasco, also. One of my many “favorite movies that nobody else remembers exists.”
I think I saw Serpico years ago, but my memories of it have been over-written by Charlie going all Serpico on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I’m one of the teenagers who fell in love with Al Pacino in “Serpico” – largely for the reasons you stated beautifully here:
Pacino is nearly perfused with sorrow, and he is beautiful, with the long hair and the wet beard and the big dying eyes. I sat bolt upright and said, “Holy SHIT, Al Pacino,” because he is fantastic in the scene, and he is also wet and naked and has this hair you want to curl up in and he can really wear a pair of hoop earrings.
I haven’t seen the movie again. But I still remember the gigantic brown eyes and his hair, well, it was amazing. So I’m afraid to see “Serpico” again because I want to keep that feeling from my then-17-year-old heart. Okay, pick apart the hyphenating….
I’m a huge Pacino fan…I can’t remember quite when that started. I don’t love the Godfather movies the way some do, though I agree that he was very good in them, and I didn’t love Serpico either, though ditto on his acting. And I haaaaate the HOO-ah, and still think that Pacino’s win over Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X is one of the worst Oscar decisions ever.
But other than all THAT, yes, I loves me some Pacino. :)
His performance in Donnie Brasco is one of the most beautifully subtle in any mob movie I’ve seen. He breaks my heart in that.
His performance in Angels in America is perfect…he gets to do the yell-y hoo-ah thing that later Pacino has made famous, but he’s doing it because it fits the character and he makes it fit the character and what is happening to him so amazingly well that it is awe-inspiring and doesn’t get tiresome like it did in Scent of a Woman.
The 70s were my prime moviegoing period (for a while, I saw almost everything that came out), so I was around when Pacino “happened.” I never considered him swoonworthy (never even realized that was a thing), but I sure found him lively and riveting in a lot of pictures right around then. The 2 Godfathers, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon… the first sign of “maybe not everything will be that good” was Bobby Deerfield, and the bad news was that (as I recall) that was the project he initiated and wanted to make.
He can still come through, but I’m pickier now. He’s fun (if unrecognizable) in Dick Tracy, touching and believably low-key in Frankie and Johnny, a convincing member of the world of Glengarry Glen Ross. More recently, I’ll speak up for Angels in America for sure, and also (to my own surprise) The Merchant of Venice.
Helen, YES! I love at the end when Charlie leaves his botched tape “4 THE MARE” outside a building that is not, in fact, City Hall. And a janitor throws it away.
And Sarah: I fell for Robert Redford when he was the Angel of Death in that Twilight Zone episode. When he flashes that scared old lady a smile and tells her to take his hand, oh man!
I’ll admit it: my favorite Pacino movie is “Author! Author!” I saw it when I was a kid and I’ve loved it ever since. It’s just so a-typical for him, and the way he interacts with all the kids in the movie is just priceless.
I’m so so happy to see people mentioning Pacino in Angels in America. I can’t recommend it (and his Roy Cohn) enough. The scenes where Streep is Ethel Rosenberg watching Cohn’s death are mind boggling.
Insulted Crab. Now THAT’S an emo band. Thanks for a great review and for the laughs.
I saw Author, Author! when I was a kid, too; who knew big Al could be so … likeable?
Loved Looking For Richard. It’s so different. “Highly compelling” is an exact description — mostly. I wouldn’t call Winona Ryder’s contribution to it unmemorable, so much as “expunged from cerebellum for the sake of my sanity.” Why must directors keeping casting her in parts she’s so clearly not suited for?
Michelle Pfeiffer and Pacino were WAY too glam for Frankie And Johnny, but he’s quite charming in the part.
I love me some Pacino, but I don’t know that I can forgive him for Ocean’s Thirteen, which was otherwise delightful. He makes Andy “Wooden” Garcia look like freaking Olivier in that. It’s just… it hurts, man.
I think it later years he went from being Al Pacino, Actor to becoming Al Pacino, Al Pacino impersonator and that sucks. Maybe if he gets something meaty to do he can recover from that, but until then, Serpico it is.
Yeah, Pacino is now apparently sporting a severe case of Jack Nicholson Syndrome, in which one shows up, acts like a muzzy amalgamation of various caricatures of oneself, and collects a paycheck.
Oh, come on, what’s this hate for Devil’s Advocate? That movie is just so fantastically over-the-top, I can’t help but love it. And if a man can’t chew some scenery when playing the Prince of Darkness himself, when can he?
… also I’d totally hit it. Look, sometimes evil sleaze does it for me. I don’t know.
a severe case of Jack Nicholson Syndrome
Hee. De Niro’s prognosis is worse, though. I don’t think we can expect him to make a good movie ever again. At least I don’t.
@Elizabeth – I totally get that. Witness my inexplicable hots for James Gandolfini in the early years of the Sopranos. What can I say, sometimes it works! Don’t shun me!
He’s the Devil in that movie. Your tots would have fangs, and they’d always win at Scrabble. Would it really be worth it?
“But then his lady friend is soaping his hair and delivering her lines like a supercomputer punch card; she’s so so bad. “I’m so. Sorry. Paco 10010100011.”” – NICE.
I am not a huge Pacino fan, but I LOVE “The Godfather I/II” and I don’t remember the nose wiping so much. (Guess I’ll have to watch it again!) For some reason, I found him totally magnetic in those 2 movies. Other than that, my mother periodically laments how attractive he was in those movies, compared to how he looks now.
I kind of liked “The Devil’s Advocate” – Pacino made it fun, in the sort of “raging around while the scenery flees in terror” kind of way (I totally stole that bit from a TWoP recap of a miniseries more or less based on the Bible which was, I must say, a truly awesome recap – Eddie Cibrian IS Joseph! Billy Campbell IS Moses!! HEH).
@ Rachel – “@Elizabeth – I totally get that. Witness my inexplicable hots for James Gandolfini in the early years of the Sopranos. What can I say, sometimes it works! Don’t shun me!”
YES. Thank you. I thought I was the only weird one. (I’m over JG now but then – wow.)