The performance Al Pacino called the closest thing to “acting genius” he’s ever seen
Having delivered several of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid himself, Al Pacino knows a thing or two about what it takes to be heralded as an acting genius.
It’s one of the strangest anomalies of a legendary career that when he finally won his long-awaited Academy Award, it was for Scent of a Woman, which nobody would consider top-tier Pacino, especially when he’s been outstanding in many better films, making the competition ridiculously fierce.
From his haunting work in the first two instalments of Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal Godfather trilogy to a powerhouse turn in Dog Day Afternoon, a bravura showcase in Serpico, a masterclass in how to alternate between intensity and scenery-chewing in Heat, and even in unsung gems like Scarecrow, Pacino earned his stripes as one of American cinema’s all-time greats.
Admittedly, top-tier performances have become fewer and farther between in recent years, although he was at least honest enough to confess that going broke had forced him to sign on for a string of middling movies that ranged from formulaic to foul, but at least his legacy was secure long before then.
Alongside contemporaries like Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson, Pacino was one of the key leading men of the ‘New Hollywood’ era, a time when the biggest names didn’t look like conventional movie stars, but, in terms of pure acting ability, blew their ‘Golden Age’ counterparts out of the water.
Another common denominator was that the quartet mentioned above and the Dunkaccino man were obsessed with Marlon Brando. They had every right to be, seeing as he changed the face of the profession and became something of a deity among the generations who followed in his wake, but there’s one of his performances that Pacino holds in higher esteem than the rest.
In only his second appearance in a feature, Brando turned thespianism upside down with his incendiary, authentic, naturalistic, and immediately iconic turn as Stanley Kowalski in Eliza Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, reprising a part he’d previously played on Broadway and somehow managing to do it even better.
Zeroing in on the unforgettable ‘Stella’ scene in particular, Pacino suggested that it was the moment screen acting peaked. “If you isolate it, you will not see an actor; you will see a tornado,” he told CBS, before acknowledging that Brando’s anguished howls changed everything about acting, and permanently.
“It did,” he stated. “I would say he’s the closest that I’ve ever seen to an acting genius.” It’s hardly the most surprising answer, because if you were to ask any world-renowned actor who broke through in the 1960s or 1970s which of their peers was worthy of being called the best of the best, 99% of them would say Brando, and many of them would agree with A Streetcar Named Desire as his performative pinnacle.
Still, that doesn’t mean Pacino doesn’t have a point, and there are a thousand valid reasons why so many icons of the silver screen hold Brando, and his Kowalski, in such high regard.
