The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (315 page)

By vague consent, Pabst is one of those directors we have a duty to remember, even if there is only a single film still compulsory viewing. With the years,
Pandora’s Box
has grown into one of the most compelling studies of sensual self-destruction, whereas the once respected humanitarianism of
Kameradschaft
seems facile; and
Westfront 1918
is no more or less profound an antiwar film than Milestone’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
.

There is no doubt that around 1930 Pabst was enormously accomplished, as a realist and in his psychological exploration—what was then called his “X-ray eye camera.” But it is the skill that impresses more than personal conviction. In retrospect, we may notice that
Pandora’s Box
and
Kameradschaft
endorse diametrically opposite attitudes to people. Was Pabst an opportunist then, a drifting director waiting for a breeze?
Kameradschaft
, for instance, is a compromise between locations in a real mining town and clever studio reconstruction of the mine tunnels.

It has even been discovered that Pabst shot two endings to that film—one hopeful, one despairing.

It seems appropriate to the conflicting method that he could not settle for one attitude or the other.
Die Freudlose Gasse
, despite its attack on inflation and urban misery, revels in its melodramatic consequences, especially the threat of the brothel awaiting Greta Garbo. And as for Pabst’s undeniable coup with Louise Brooks, the originality of
Pandora
comes from Brooks’s fearless sense of an intelligent woman unable to resist her own sensuality. Pabst’s contribution is that of entrepreneur, selecting Brooks to enact the erotic spiral of Wedekind’s original.

The filming is proficient and expressive, but Pabst is content to create a heavy, fogbound Victorian atmosphere, such as he used in
Die Dreigroschenoper
, to smother the dramatic starkness that Brecht had intended. Such background detail is common to much of Pabst’s work and it is secondhand compared with the worlds invented by Lang for
Metropolis, Frau im Mond, M
, or the Mabuse films. Pabst excelled in the selection of detail—objects, expressions, and quick effects of light. Certainly, with Brooks this alertness was fully stimulated; her darting spontaneity as Lulu adds to the meaning because it runs counter to the massive premeditation of the German actors. Lulu still thrills us because of Louise Brooks’s effect of vulnerable emotional vitality.
Pandora’s Box
seems the one occasion when Pabst trusted a player to carry a film, rather than the theory that the camera could penetrate psychological reality.

With
Geheimnisse einer Seele
this approach added to a schematic and tendentious dramatization of Freudian theories, but with
Pandora’s Box
and
Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen
the discovery is startling and moving. Is Pabst or Brooks the true creative personality in those films? The tentativeness in all Pabst’s work, and the dullness of most of his later films, support Lotte Eisner’s feeling that Brooks had “succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal director’s talent to the extreme.”

Like many other German filmmakers, in 1933 Pabst moved to France. While there he made a picturesque version of
Don Quixote
starring Chaliapin as the Don (and with George Robey as Sancho in the English version). His one Hollywood venture,
A Modern Hero
, at Warners, starring Richard Barthelmess, was a flop and Pabst returned to France, and then to Austria. Lotte Eisner reported that he had tried to justify the return with a string of family circumstances, so plausible that they seemed more suspicious. Whatever the real motives, the decision weighed on him.
Feuertaufe
was a documentary on the conquest of Poland, and by 1943 he was forced back on the life of
Paracelsus
as a way of keeping in work.

His postwar films included two made in Italy, as well as
Der Letzte Akt
, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s account of the last days of Hitler, and a film about the July 1944 plot. But Pabst was never rehabilitated, chiefly because that surface brilliance had gone from his films, revealing only a plodding sentimental pursuit of psychological orthodoxy.

Al Pacino
(Alberto Pacino), b. New York, 1940
He is “big Al” now, to public and actors alike, no matter that he is a small man. Only outrageous inner size—wicked will—could have gotten away with
Scent of a Woman
. Somehow he conveys the charm and the neediness of a perilously recovered invalid. With rare, sweet stealth, he has insinuated himself as one of our great actors. He is so much more accessible and beguiling than De Niro or Hoffman. He has learned to be seductive. But he cannot rid himself of that faint edge of the sinister. I’m not sure he tries. Did playing Michael Corleone seep that far into his system? For Michael is the great role of modern American movies, and it lives with Pacino still.

When American television remixed both parts of
The Godfather
in 1977 and poured them out again in chronological order, a striking error emerged. Whereas Brando and De Niro had won Oscars in the films—for distinguished performances—Al Pacino went unrewarded. Yet he dominates the work. As the story advances, Pacino’s Michael betrays values and gentleness with creeping isolation, and turns the social spectacle of immigrant glory into a bitter chamber-work. But he made the poison of vengeance and paranoia absolutely persuasive. Coppola may have hoped for critical detachment in the film, but his lethal hero commands the tone with the self-pity that must order such executions. He is the natural armchair tyrant for a medium that makes us sitting accomplices in every witnessed death.

Pacino came to
The Godfather
(72, Francis Ford Coppola) as nearly a newcomer. He had made only
Me, Natalie
(69, Fred Coe) and
Panic in Needle Park
(71, Jerry Schatzberg), quirky films deemed worthy of an enterprising Off-Broadway actor. He looked a lot less than thirty in the first hour of
The Godfather
. He is a hero home from the war, nearly as green as Robert Walker in
The Clock
. Brothers and mafiosi tease him good-naturedly; he is shy of telling Diane Keaton he loves her over the phone in front of a kitchen full of gangsters. His hair flops over his brow, and his wide eyes seem too vacant to have faced combat.

But there is already a warning coldness that relishes the shock to Keaton when he explains the offer his father once made to the bandleader who owned Johnny Fontane. At that point, Michael has seemingly rejected his family’s ways, but the deadpan account of brains or signature on the contract is filled with military instinct. When he draws the protesting Kay into the family photograph, it is less a gesture of romantic warmth than his plan for dynasty.

Michael discovers himself through family allegiance, and it is notable in the first two parts of the film how little affection he displays for either of his wives. He is touched by father and sons only; brothers he first surveys, then humbles and eliminates. They are too nearly rivals to his succession. When Don Vito is shot, it is Michael who happens to visit the hospital and recognizes a plot to finish off his father. With another chance visitor, the timid Enzio, he holds off the assassins with a daring masquerade. The two small men mount guard on the hospital steps and the hoodlums’ car creeps away in frustration. Enzio’s nerves are in tatters, and he can hardly feed himself a cigarette. But Michael notices how steady his own hand is as he supplies a light. He never mentions this control to anyone else in the film, but Pacino pounces on the instant and gives it a cold-blooded intellectual satisfaction.

When Sterling Hayden’s rogue cop arrives, Michael exults in his own physical punishment. Pacino can radiate spiritual morbidity, and he martyrs himself passionately. The effect on his delicate face is awesome. Swelling and bruising stay there well into his Sicilian exile. It shows brutal maturity and suffering, but it is also a premonition of malignance in Michael. The bruising turns into the various hollows of compromise, lying, and manipulation. It also prepares us for the sonata close-ups of
Part II
when Michael’s face lurks in half-darkness. He needs no one and rejects honest dealing: so the man hides behind the obelisk stare of a demoralized god. If acting for movies is allowing the camera to look within or through the surface, then Pacino achieves something remarkable, for he leads
The Godfather
from a study of the world of action to the immobile reverie of a lonely tyrant.

His other work showed the vagaries of the movie scene, and the bankable asset of moody romanticism in Pacino’s screen persona.
Scarecrow
(73) was another windy allegory from Jerry Schatzberg, an attempt at poetic hoboism that ends in depressed silence. In
Serpico
(73, Sidney Lumet), too, another character says of Pacino’s, “either you’re exploding or you’re lying around like a catatonic.” The explosions are not convincing or moving, but Serpico is a fascinating instance of overt New York realism succumbing to the introspection of the actor. Lumet may have wanted a lively drama of cops on the take and big city cover-ups. But Pacino diverted it into the ballad of a sad, aloof hippie. It is his cutest film, a self-righteous pose.

Dog Day Afternoon
(75, Lumet) was his least restrained film, yet his untidy prettiness did help explain the jittery excitement of the ardent bank robber. More challenging was
Bobby Deerfield
(77, Sydney Pollack), in which he caught the austere, nearly frigid insecurity of the racing driver who has A+ on his suit. Deerfield is in hiding from pain and complication; he longs for a circuit free from error in which he merges with his machine. He will use anything as a cover or defense: cars, his helmet, dark glasses, and indifference. Yet again, his pallor seems scarcely able to subdue a dark inner lining, sometimes only anxiety or perplexity, but sometimes equivalent to decay. Pacino often guards his face with his hands, as if afraid of loss, wounding, or being seen. His identity is acutely vulnerable there and, as well as the battering he endures in
The Godfather
, in
Serpico
he is shot in the face. That reprisal leaves his speech affected, and he has a variety of lisps and tricks of the voice that suggest subterfuge. Bobby Deerfield is from Newark, and the devices to disguise a New Jersey whine are very cunningly introduced. He never quite sounds adult.

Best of all in that film, however, is the moment when Marthe Keller challenges him to risk his precious celebrity—as hard and encumbered as a turtle—by walking down a Florentine street without his shades. The way in which Pacino bears the indignity of not being recognized is funny and touching. It is a heartwarming scene in an unexpectedly mordant film. It showed how winsome Pacino might be if he let his charm loose, and how much he needed the internal conflict of guarding against his loveliness and trying to make it baleful.

In the eighties, Pacino sometimes seemed like a man in a dark room, who feared monsters in the corners and holes in the floor—perhaps, secretly, he had set himself on playing a blind man. He was away from the screen for lengthy periods; he undertook daring theatrical ventures; some of his films were major failures; and yet … the Pacino cult grew. When he “returned” to the screen as the world-weary cop in
Sea of Love
(89, Harold Becker), he could not help seeming a disenchanted actor wondering whether the farfetched melodrama would hold. But in theatres it was easy to feel audience relief and pleasure that he was back. The sad, wry look on Pacino’s face now inspired love.

He had been a rabble-rousing lawyer in
… And Justice for All
(79, Norman Jewison); a writer with problems of love and marriage in the disappointing
Author! Author!
(82, Arthur Hiller); and the subject of gay protests when he played a cop in
Cruising
(80, William Friedkin). Collectively, those films were at best a marking time. But in
Scarface
(83, Brian De Palma), Pacino left no doubts: he was Cuban now, mouthing the accent as if it were one hot strawberry after another; he was outgoing, randy, a showoff. Tony Montana was gripping from start to finish—monstrous, operatic, overdone, yet filled with detail and an unforgettable love of life.

Alas, the next picture—
Revolution
(85, Hugh Hudson)—was a dreadful mistake, a silly story, a lousy accent, and the object of much abuse. Thus, Pacino waited four years before the modest
Sea of Love
, where he was sustained by Richard Price’s rattling dialogue and Ellen Barkin’s sour-lemon sexpot—Pacino has always done talk brilliantly, but now he had an appetite for sex.

He had a flashy cameo in
Dick Tracy
(90, Warren Beatty), the best performance in the film. Then he returned as an older, contrite Michael Corleone in
The Godfather Part III
(90, Coppola). The concept of this third film was that Michael had changed—and that may do fatal damage to what made Michael so compelling once. But the version of
III
released theatrically was so rushed that Pacino’s performance suffered—he is a lot more touching in the later video release.

Pacino then did two films in which he was miscast, but in which he defied the “error” and willed us into liking the result:
Frankie and Johnny
(91, Garry Marshall) and
Scent of a Woman
(92, Martin Brest). The notion of Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer as drab folks who work in a diner and seem unsuited to romance must stand among Hollywood’s wildest self-delusions: Pacino and Pfeiffer are Wagnerian in their grand passion.

In
Scent of a Woman
, Pacino was asked to play a blinded, military martinet, close to suicide but taken out of himself by a weekend spent on the town with a young preppie. The film is absurd. No self-respecting army would entertain Pacino as a spy let alone an officer. The film ran two and a half hours on a very slight story! And Pacino made it a hit, brought the tango back into fashion, and got an Oscar—his first, after seven nominations.