Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates. Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Al Pacino — It’s not presumptuous to state that these two words will be familiar to every cinephile around the globe. The celebrated actor has one Oscar, two Primetime Emmys, and two Tony Awards to his credit. He has been the face of acclaimed features like Scarface, The Godfather, Scent of a Woman, Heat, Donnie Brasco, Carlito’s Way, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon… the list just goes on and on.
But today we discuss his stellar work in Francis Ford Coppola’s groundbreaking The Godfather (1972). And one pivotal sequence in particular, the one where Pacino’s Michael Corleone is transformed from a former soldier to an unforgiving mafia leader. Yes, that restaurant scene when the young but tired-looking Michael takes out his gun and shoots a civilian for the first time (presumably).
The scene is set, Michael is there to talk to the men responsible for taking down his father (Don Corleone, the titular Godfather, played by Marlon Brando). He is frisked before entering the darkened room. The gloomy grey-yellow colour palette foreshadows the deaths of the men Pacino’s character has come to negotiate with. The young Corleone wants ‘guarantee’ that no one will hurt his ageing father again. Words are exchanged in Sicilian, and then Pacino asks for a bathroom break. He has a gun hidden there behind the flush tank; the search for it is long and winding. And then Pacino consciously touches his hair, we are just able to see the back of his head for a while as he is of course making up his mind to take the decisive and dark step of murdering another human. There is much ado about a lot. The silence is deafening, electric almost.
Michael is back from the loo, more things are said, but this time he tunes out the conversation. He has more pressing things to consider. His mind has already been made up, now he is just waiting for the right time to press the trigger. Then it happens, that long-pending pay-off of seeing one of the leading characters of the feature become something cool and practical, and inhuman. Michael is the new Don, in all sense of the term.
But did you know that that the role for which Pacino ultimately bagged an Oscar nomination was something he was almost fired from? In an earlier interview with ABC news, the actor had shared that after seeing the first few rushes of the movie, the higher ups were not quite taken with Al’s performance.
“They wanted to fire me when I was on the picture … [during] the shooting, first couple of weeks. Because they kept seeing the rushes, you know, or the footage that was shot, and they kept looking at it and thinking, ‘What is he doing?’” Pacino had told the media outlet at the time.
“I was so confused at that time, and Francis (Ford Coppola, the director) was so supportive, you know, and so helping me in it, all of it. If it wasn’t for Francis, I would’ve just not showed up one day and said, ‘Hey, look man, I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted.’ It was — yes, a form of innocence or detachment in a crazy way. It was a kind of detachment. And then so that when the character finally emerges … you say where did that come from? That was what I was really going after,” Pacino remembered.
And then speaking specifically of the restaurant scene, Pacino stated, “Without the great Sterling Hayden and … little Al Lettieri (his co-actors in the scene), I wouldn’t be here today. They’d have let me go — even Francis couldn’t stop them,” Pacino concluded.
I’m thankful to Sterling Hayden and Al Lettieri too, but mostly to Al Pacino, for delivering a masterful act in a masterful movie.
You can watch The Godfather on Amazon Prime Video and YouTube.
Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates. Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express.
