Tag: John Cazale

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Al Pacino takes a bank hostage in Dog Day Afternoon

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Al Pacino (Sonny Wortzik), John Cazale (Sal Naturile), Charles Durning (Sgt Eugene Moretti), Chris Sarandon (Leon Sharmer), James Broderick (Agent Sheldon), Lance Henriksen (Agent Murphy), Penelope Allen (Sylvia), Sully Boyer (Mulvaney), Susan Peretz (Angie Wortzik), Carol Kane (Jenny)

Perhaps only in the 70s could a failed bank robber have been turned over-night into a counter-culture folk-hero. It’s the subject of Sidney Lumet’s thrilling, heist-gone-wrong movie, set on one sweltering day in New York when Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) tried to rob a bank to fund the sex-change operation of his boyfriend Leon (Chris Sarandon). He ends up taking the co-operative bank staff hostage while a media and public firestorm takes place outside the bank, mixed in amongst an army of trigger-happy cops. And it’s all based on a true story.

Sonny is far from your hardened criminal. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. He takes care of the hostages, who all become immensely fond of him and his less confident partner-in-crime Sal (John Cazale). When the police and media turn up, Sonny is outraged at the trigger-happy police presence and quickly wins the support of the crowd with his honesty, bluntness and quick wit. With the police incapable of controlling the situation, soon he is actively playing to the crowd, taking phone calls from the press in the bank. He becomes a counter-culture icon, sticking it to the man (his famous chant of “Attica!”, refers to the famous prison riots, where prisoners rioted to secure their rights).

It’s the key topic that fascinates Sidney Lumet, in this brilliantly frentic, edgy and dynamic film, that captures the tension in New York, where it felt like the careful balance between law and order could disintegrate any time. Lumet’s improvisational feel with the crowds, the edgy, raw performances – particularly from Pacino and Durning, both of whom are sensational – and the sense that anything could happen at any time. Dog Day Afternoon is about a city on the edge, combined with the ability of the media to turn regular people into stars. There was little faith in the authorities, and even a little bit of nose thumbing in their direction could sway the crowds.

At the centre of all this is Sonny, a fascinatingly flawed person, partly absorbed with being the centre of attention, part desperately trying to work out what his best move is among an increasingly narrowing number of options. Al Pacino nearly didn’t take the role, after suffering a near nervous collapse from the pressure of Godfather Part II – but, after committing to the film, he gave one of his most extraordinary performances of an era he and a small group of actors dominated.

Sonny feels increasingly trapped in his predicament. The robbery of the bank is hilariously cack-handed from the start – one of the robbers bails in minutes and has to be begged not to go home in the get-away car – and it becomes clear that for Sonny this is all a last desperate throw of the dice. Both of his relationships – with his first wife and his second marriage to Leon – are relationships on the brink of disaster, destabilised by Sonny’s desperate need for prove of love and affection. He’s a man uncertain in his own skin, smart enough to know the world isn’t fair, but not smart enough to know what to do with it. Fundamentally decent, but forced into illegal actions. Pacino delivers this with the expected fireworks, but when we see Sonny away from the public gaze, he’s a sad, broken-down, isolated man who genuinely doesn’t know where his life is going.

Dog Day Afternoon was radical at the time for how it deals with homosexuality. Neither Sonny nor Leon are presented – as might have been expected at the time – as limp-wristed or fey, but just regular guys who happen to want different things from life. Chris Sarandon (Oscar nominated) is strikingly tender, low-key and world-weary as a man resigned to what the world is throwing at him, from the emotional pressure of meeting Sonny’s needs for affection, to spending every day feeling trapped in his body and facing suspicious stares from all around him. Pacino presents Sonny as a masculine, dynamic figure whose sexuality is just part of his personality. It’s a film not afraid to acknowledge the love between men, and never considers this anything other than entirely normal – something extremely unlikely in 70s cinema. Indeed, you can see the mood of the time in the way the crowd changes once the motivations behind Sonny’s actions becomes clear. Hostility grows – through many gay rights activists quickly arrive to bolster the crowd. The films normalising of homosexuality, also serves as a critique for the assumptions and reduced options many identifying as gay had at the time.

Of course, this all makes the entire siege even more attractive to the media. The film is a neat satire of the way the press can turn events like this into entertainment. A pizza delivery guy, sent to feed the hostages, can barely contain his excitement, screaming “I’m a star!”. At least two hostages refuse offers to leave the siege – at least partly, it’s suggested, because there is nowhere better to be than at the centre of the show. Pacino’s electric playing to the crowd demonstrates how Sonny’s firecracker sense of the turmoil of the period – the violence of the authorities and the lack of justice for the regular guy – helps feed this. The media’s eagerness to sensationalise the events, do turn them from real life into entertainment – and the way so many characters and on-lookers yearn to be part of a real-life drama – is sharply critiqued, with truth and humanity sacrificed for prime-time ratings (ideas Lumet would explore even more deeply in his next film Network).

It’s also fascinating to watch the cack-handed police inexperience at handling sieges like this, from the lack of central control to the trigger-happy cops, to allowing public and the media to get within a few metres of the bank entrance. Charles Durning is superb as a frazzled police sergeant, out of his depth, unable to control his colleagues and totally lacking the calm and control needed for hostage negotiations. He’s replaced in the operation by FBI agent Sheldon – played with a chilling distance by James Broderick – who represents the other side of the law at the time: ruthless, cold and very ready to switch from negotiation to execution.

Sonny may look is in control of things, but it’s quickly clear no-one really is. Even Sonny feels this, Pacino delivering with a resigned calm a scene where Sonny asks one of the bank tellers to record his final will. Dog Day Afternoon is also a tragedy, with the real victim being Sal, Sonny’s partner in the robbery. He’s played with an almost childish innocence by John Cazale, as a not very-bright man completely out of his depth, whose idea of a foreign country to escape to is Wyoming (a hilarious piece of improvisation by Cazale). While Sonny is the public face of the situation – and someone law officials figure they can work with – Sal becomes a dangerous unknown quantity for them that they feel needs to be disposed with. An offer they openly make to Sonny, who furiously rejects it (but, tellingly perhaps, doesn’t tell Sal about).

Poor Sal sweetly chats with the staff. He quietly warns about the dangers of smoking. He sweats and timidly waits to be told what to do. He bravely tells Sonny that he is completely ready to shoot the hostages, while clearly having no idea about the emotional reality of doing this. He meekly follows instructions and is responds with panic to almost every situation. Cazale’s flawless performance turns him into the real victim here, completely unprepared in every way for the situation he is in (he whiningly complains about being called gay on the news, and is terrified at the idea of flying with the hostages to a foreign country, having never been in a plane before). It’s a wonderful personal tragedy that plays in the background of the film.

Lumet’s film has the dynamic vibe of a fly-on-the-wall documentary turned drama. Pacino is the perfect actor for this, his performance (Oscar-nominated) sensational, high-octane and demonstrative mixed with confused, vulnerable and eventually traumatised and guilt-ridden. The film brilliantly balances questions of politics, media and sexuality, offering seering critiques of attitudes around all three. Wrapped into a fire-cracker film, this is a brilliant piece of social commentary, personal tragedy and street theatre. Overlooked more than it deserved, it’s a masterpiece of 70s film making.

The Godfather Part II (1974)

Al Pacino defines his career (and film history) as The Godfather Part II

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen), Diane Keaton (Kay Corelone), Robert De Niro (Vito Corleone), John Cazale (Fredo Corleone), Talia Shire (Connie Corleone), Lee Strasberg (Hyman Roth), Michael V. Gazzo (Frank Pentangeli), GD Spradlin (Senator Pat Greary), Richard Bright (Al Neri), Gastone Moschin (Don Fanucci), Morgana King (Mama Corelone)

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul? It’s the question that drives this triumphant, Oscar-laden, sequel to Coppola’s cinema-defining masterpiece, The Godfather to create what is, without doubt, the greatest one-two punch in cinema history, two films that develop and contrast each other naturally it’s very easy to consider them as one perfect film.

It’s 1958 and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has seen his power grow to control Crime across several states. However problems confront him including rivalry from Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) his business partner, a disaffected capo Frank Pentangeli (Michael V Gazzo) talking to a Senate investigation and growing tensions in his marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton). The story is intercut with the rise to power of his father Vito (Robert DeNiro), a man raising his family in Little Italy and realising the temptations of a life of crime.

Happy with just one Godfather film, Coppola only agreed to a second in return for a pile of cash and complete creative control. He used that to create a film even deeper, richer and mesmeric (perhaps) than the first film. While The Godfather is high grade pulp fiction, shot and assembled with arthouse skill and layered with depth, Part II is a profound family saga, an arthouse epic spliced with rich vein of pulp fiction at its heart. A multi-generational story that illustrates the dark corruption at the heart of America from top to bottom, it also demonstrates the stark differences in personality and action between two ruthless, authoritarian father figures who do all that they do in the name of family, one of whom sees that family prosper and grow around him, the other who destroys everyone near to him.

Coppola’s film removes much of the slightly cuddily family element from the Corleone family to show a darker, bleaker, chillier movie than its landmark predecessor. Coppola uses his control to expand and deepen the Corleone saga both in the past and present, but also in the dark hearts and secrets of a family built on crime, extortion and murder. It’s a thematically rich, engrossing and beautifully assembled piece of film-making. Exquisite in every touch and beat, completely convincing and breath-taking in its confidence it is clearly the greatest sequel ever made.

The film charts the final descent of Michael Corleone into the dark recesses of his own worst desires and instincts. The brutal, unforgiving, unrelenting coldness and absolute certainty matched with the overwhelming hunger to win that has left him hollowed out and unrecognisable from the naïve, idealistic young war hero we were introduced to at the wedding that opens The Godfather. Of course, even at the start of the film, as Michael holds court with a chilling coolness and maintains only awkward contact with his family – all of whom must submit to him and his wishes or face lethal consequences – it’s clear that the man who talked of “it’s my family Kay, it’s not me” is a long, long way away.

During the film we see Michael seem to harden even further, an adamantine chillness captured superbly by Al Pacino. In, without doubt, the greatest performance of his career, Pacino restrains bar maybe three times, the explosive energy and ferocity that has been the hallmark of his career (a feat that allegedly made him physically ill). Instead, he presents a Michael who is an almost pathologically cold fish, a fiercely intelligent, scheming observer with eyes that observe and understand everything, jet black boreholes that suggest only whirlpools of emptiness behind them. He’s unrelenting, lacks any doubt and (it becomes clear) has not a vestige of pity left in him, with empathy forced out of his body like water from a squeezed sponge. Pacino prowls every frame like a quiet tiger, oozing sharpness, intelligence and lethal, ruthless ambition.

Everything is done to protect and secure his family and its legacy, but each action seems to strip him one by one of everyone he claims to be protecting. His children seem to live in intimidation and later terror of him. His wife turns from misery to loathing to being ejected from the family home, even aborting her pregnancy to prevent herself bringing another Corleone into the world (a reaction that leads to a final, relationship severing explosion of rage from Michael). His brother Fredo, poor sweet, foolish Fredo, is sacrificed to an unrelenting desire for revenge. The man who did everything for “the family” ends the film by having his last surviving brother executed. The brother who, the film’s coda reveals, was the only member of the family to support his signing up for service in World War Two.

As Coppola’s camera drills into the face of Michael, cold, greying, alone in an autumnal garden – and how often the film simply studies the ruthless calculation of Michael, the man who understands every move everyone makes before they even make it – you know we are looking at a man who has damned himself, who has destroyed everything who claims to hold dear while working to protect it.

Brilliantly, Coppola intercuts the storyline of Michael’s damning collapse into complete moral damnation with the rise of his father. The Young Vito Corleone – played with Oscar-winning skill by De Niro who superbly channels the basic facets of Brando’s performance mixed with his own charm – arrives in America to find it a land as in thrall to the rule of the gangs as his hometown in Sicily. Like Michael in the first film, he is tempted by the world of crime and finds he has a natural aptitude for it: like his son he is a man who people follow, and the man who has the will to do what must be done. Like him he is an empire builder who commands respect and honour.

But unlike his son, he is a man capable of warmth, of empathy. He is man who can be playful, who respects others, who can feel forgiveness, who sees others as people, not just (as Michael does) simply being tools to be manipulated. Vito may be a murderer like his son, but he loves his wife, he loves his children and he can form bonds with them – natural, warm, loving bonds – that Michael can only dream of doing. For Vito it is all about the family, and providing for them is what inspires his actions. For Michael it’s words, but for Vito – it is everything.

Coppola masterfully intercuts these two storylines so they brilliantly comment and contrast with each other. Each step of Michael’s struggles to overcome the plots around him, are perfectly bookended with contrasting moments of Vito’s own rise to power, and the bonds of loyalty he builds even as Michael destroys those own bonds in his own life.

But then Michael is dealing with high stakes. While Vito’s early life shows Mafiosi running Little Italy, and calling the shots on the neighbourhood, a local tradition inherited en masse from the mother land, Michael moves in the worlds of government corruption. The empire we see Vito start to build is destined under his son to interfere in the rule of whole countries in Cuba, and commit unspeakable crimes to bring Senators and witnesses under their control in Senate Hearings into Organised Crime.

Coppola had intended the storyline around the reluctant family witness to be Clemenza, but Richard Castellano famously refused to reprise his role unless he was allowed to write his own dialogue. (The Godfather Part II was blighted with actor disputes: Brando refused to reprise his role in the film’s coda, while James Caan was paid more for a day’s work than he was for the whole of the first film). Instead the role was passed to Michael V Gazzo (Oscar nominated) as Frankie Pentangali, a loud-mouthed Capo manipulated into thinking he has been betrayed by the family. This threat hangs over the second half of the film – but Michael barely seems to break sweat under interrogation.

He has more problems with the Meyer Lansky inspired Hyman Roth (played by Pacino’s teacher, the legendary Lee Strasberg – also Oscar nominated). Roth it is who immerses Michael in a corrupt takeover of the Cuban government by the Mafia – an attempt foiled by the revolution – and Roth who becomes his nemesis, an old man in a hurry, who believes he can match the ruthlessness of this man without a soul. Coppola’s scenes of Cuban excess – not to mention the danger on the street as the country starts to tear itself apart – are of course masterful.

Cuba destroys Fredo, a snivelling John Cazale (inexplicably not nominated, despite extraordinary work here – never mind nomination he arguably should have won). Cazale’s Fredo is endearing but simple, a fundamentally weak man in a family of wolves, whose guilt is almost embarrassingly easily unveiled. Petulantly – but terrifyingly – raging late in the film at Michael at being passed over, he sits (sweaty and veins throbbing) in a reclining chair that bounces on each point he makes – a simple touch that makes him seem more and more impotent and pathetic every second.

The film echoes much of the structure of the first film, but here retold with a chilling coldness as the warm heart that – for all his crimes – Vito bought to this family is removed. The opening family event, Anthony’s confirmation, is a public show with no personality at all, where the Italians feel all at sea, their culture not known or cared for. Doors are closed on Kay with an alarming regularity – their marriage is so non-functional that even at the start they seem to have very little to say to each other. Vito returns to Sicily, as Michael did, but this time to extract revenge for his parents not to fall in love. The ending of the film culminates in a dark, ruminative and tragic hinged cleansing of Michael’s – crucially not the families but Michael personally – enemies.

The film is blessed with a brilliant array of supporting turns, from Diane Keaton’s soft-faced sadness masking deep and lasting resentment as Kay, to a flashily amusing tone from GD Spranlin as the greasily corrupt Senator. Robert Duvall does unsung but powerful work as a Tom Hagen coldly loyal, perhaps even in slight fear of his adopted brother, but despite his seeming decency willing to carry out truly terrible deeds for the family. Talia Shire (also nominated) is great as the rebellious Connie who pleads in vain for Fredo’s salvation.

This is all beautifully packaged together by Coppola into a film that meditates on the building and the destruction of a family, two stories neatly told together in parallel, with each echoing the other. It is a film shot at a riveting but controlled pace, that uses the classical filmic style of the original but mixed even further with the genius shooting of Gordon Willis to add a dark tinged 1970s style to ever shot. The film is an art house classic, but also a superb plot boiler, a gangster film that tells us profound truths about the attitudes that make us men and those that destroy us, just as it suggests that the darkness at the heart of crime will eventually consume the very thing it starts out to protect (even if it does take generations). While it is not as entertaining or engaging perhaps as the first film – it is perhaps an even greater achievement, a superb triumph of atmosphere and tone and a terrifying insight into the darkness that man can achieve.

For at the end Michael has won utterly. But he is also utterly defeated.

The Deer Hunter (1978)

Robert De Niro goes into a journey into the dark heart of America’s Vietnam experience in The Deer Hunter

Director: Michel Cimino

Cast: Robert De Niro (Mike Vronsky), Christopher Walken (Nick Chevotarevich), John Savage (Steven Pushkov), John Cazale (Stan), Meryl Streep (Linda), George Dzundza (John Welsh), Pierre Sagui (Julian Grinda), Shirley Stoler (Steven’s mother), Chuck Aspregren (Peter Axelrod)

The Deer Hunter is a mighty 1970s milestone of American cinema. Michael Cimino’s Vietnam story is a big poetic epic – its plot is slim but it’s all about the atmosphere, and Cimino’s understanding of the impact that the trauma of war has on different types of men. For vast stretches of the film nothing much in particular happens, followed by short, sharp bursts of gut-wrenching tension – but these have such impact because we have taken the time to see these men’s ordinary lives.

Mike Vronsky (Robert De Niro), Nick Chevotarevich (Christopher Walken) and Steve Pushkov (John Savage) are three Polish-American friends working in a Pittsburgh steel yard, who have volunteered to serve in Vietnam. Before they ship out, they celebrate Steve’s wedding, in a traditional Polish ceremony, and go for one last deer hunt in the woods together – where Mike outlines his philosophy of “one clean shot” (or “This is This”) and the near sacred experience of man communing with nature and hunting. In Vietnam, the three friends are captured by the Viet Cong and forced to take part in a chilling competition of Russian roulette. The impact of these experiences changes their lives – and not for the better – as they struggle to adjust as the war comes to an end.

Michael Cimino was seen at the time as the next great director. This reputation lasted little more than two years, when the box office disaster of his next film Heaven’s Gate (with its tales of ludicrous excess and Cimino’s overly demanding perfectionism) led to the destruction of a studio and effectively ended his career. To be honest, the roots of all this are there in The Deer Hunter. Cimino fought tooth and nail to prevent anything in the film being cut – and he lucked out that he had a few supportive producers and a picture powered by great performances and capturing something of the spirit of the age. Because just this once, more was indeed more.

In some ways The Deer Hunter is an over-indulgent mess. It’s very long, its plot is very slight, it’s very pleased with itself, the camera dawdles for ages through first the friends preparing for a wedding, the wedding itself and then a long hunting trip. This takes up a solid opening hour and 15 minutes of this long film – and progresses the plot forward very little other than establishing the characters and their relationships. But somehow, despite this, the film is magnetic during this. I’m almost not quite sure why, because nothing really happens at great length, but there is a sort of poetic majesty about these sequences that just makes them work.

It’s also a perfect entrée into our characters. After basically sitting and watching them for over an hour do little more than live their everyday lives, we really feel like we understand them. We know Mike is distant, controlled, slightly repressed but prone to moments of exhibitionist wildness that suggest primal, raging emotions beneath the surface. We also understand, with his famous “this is this” speech (“what the fuck does that mean?” his frustrated friend-cum-adversary Stan blurts out), that he is reaching for some sort of symbolic, expressionist understanding of man’s place in the world. He wants to be a poet but doesn’t have the abilities of expression to achieve that.

Similarly, we see Nick as a more carefree, open spirit, someone more in touch with expressing himself and more ready to seize life by the horns. He’s also got a gentle, conciliatory quality to him – out of all the characters, he fits most naturally into the role of confidante. Steven is a child, just trying to do his best in the world, but too naïve for the grown-up world. Most crucially we also see how they interact with each other, and how they relate to women.

Most women in the film are clearly of very little importance to the characters. Wives and girlfriends are very much on the outskirts of the macho world of the steelyard. And they are of similarly little concern to the men when they come home. Meryl Streep – excellent in an almost nothing part, really it’s amazing how slimly this role is written – plays a woman torn between feelings for Mike and Nick, but the men’s feelings for her waver between uncertainty, indifference and confused affection. Barely any other woman gets a look in, certainly not Steve’s wife who is treated with open suspicion as some sort of floozy.

All this thematic manly matiness then explodes in the later acts of the film, as the after-impact of war – and PTSD, although the word is never used – hits our characters square in the face. And there are few things that will hit you as square on as a bullet. Cimino of course faced waves of criticism about his inclusion of the grisly gambit (no evidence that it was used by the Viet Cong) – but as a metaphor for going to war, and the trauma it will do to your mind, there are few things better than a “sport” which involves placing a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.

These scenes are already tension-inducing to watch (you can’t help but put yourself in the shoes of the men putting that gun to their heads and wondering if they’ll hear a click or nothing ever again) but Cimino ramps up the pressure here, helped by truly powerhouse performances by De Niro, Walken and Savage. The unbelievable intensity of these scenes, and the total gear shift from everything you’ve seen up to this point in the movie, is a justification of Cimino’s slow pace earlier. After a luxurious opening sequence where we’ve watched the guys fool around, dance, sing and play pool, to suddenly be thrown into this grim, despairing, terrifying situation works brilliantly.

No wonder the rest of the film feels as much in shock as the characters do. Walken is exceptional (and Oscar-winning) as the sensitive soul whose spirit and will to live are destroyed by the incident, who no longer sees any point going home and barely even (by the end) seems to remember who or what he was. Cimino even makes the film feel colder, drabber and chillier in the third act back in Pittsburgh, following Mike’s return home – and his utter inability to deal with his experiences or communicate the horrors of what he has gone through to his friends.

This is also where the film gains immeasurably from a truly sublime performance from De Niro as Mike. In any other actor’s career, this performance would be the stand-out, so it says a lot for De Niro that it’s so often overlooked. But he underplays to devastating effect, as an inarticulate, slightly shy man who has a sheen of confidence, who will do what it needs to survive, who has a poetry and power of love in him that he can’t really express or understand. De Niro is truly brilliant in this film, a still centre that bears almost the total weight of Cimino’s thematic intentions. Essentially De Niro kinda plays an everyman Vietnam vet, and the burden of a whole country after the war without ever having the release of fireworks. He’s excellent.

But then the whole film is a little bit excellent. The Deer Hunter is a masterpiece of a sort, a compelling, dark, tragic and unsettling piece of poetic movie-making. Saying that, there’s something uncomfortable in its depiction of its non-American characters – to a man they are all violence loving degenerates – but then in a film that focuses on the unsettling experience of these Hicksville Americans in a land they don’t understand and can’t deal with, this is at least justifiable in a sense. The Deer Hunter’s main problem at points is that it is a rather pompous, pleased with itself film, but it’s not so much the story that is so strong here but the telling – and Cimino’s telling is first class.