Al Pacino’s five career-defining movies, according to Al Pacino: “To show who I was”
His track record might have grown increasingly spotty in recent years, but nobody will ever be able to deny Al Pacino as one of cinema’s all-time greats, and he’s even got an excuse for making so many terrible movies over the last 20 years after admitting he only did them because he went broke.
Great performances have become fewer and further between for the two-time Academy Award-winning veteran, but he’d already assured his position as one of American cinema’s best ever by the end of the 1970s when he embarked on a run of top-tier turns that’s quite frankly staggering in its consistent excellence.
It was almost unfair to his contemporaries that within the space of six years, Pacino dominated the screen in The Godfather, Scarecrow, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, Bobby Deerfield, and …And Justice for All, with Jack Nicholson arguably the only one of his peers who could match that streak.
Pacino notched five Academy Award nominations, won a Bafta from three nods, and claimed a Golden Globe from six nominations from those films alone, which is one of the main reasons why there’s a lingering feeling his overdue win for Scent of a Woman was more of a lifetime achievement prize than a deserving honour, especially when Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X was gunning for the same statue.
He’s been excellent in many pictures since then, and even though he remains capable of stealing the occasional scene, it’s not too harsh to suggest that Pacino’s last truly magnificent work on the big screen came in Michael Mann’s Heat three decades ago. The veteran would likely agree, too, seeing as none of the five performances he called career-defining came after 1996.
When Lawrence Grobel asked him to pick a quintet of films that he’d put in a time capsule for future generations to unearth for the definitive Al Pacino experience, he didn’t ruminate for long: “To show who I was? I would have to go back and painfully look at every one of the films I’ve made and discuss it with some people and come up with some conclusions.”
Seconds later, “off the top,” he named The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Scarface, Serpico, and Looking for Richard. Grobel was surprised that he’d chosen Serpico over Dog Day Afternoon, and Pacino explained why he favoured one Sidney Lumet classic over the other.
“Well, Dog Day was at the early stages of television entertaining itself,” he offered. “It was the early stage of the car chase. It was the first time when the pizza boy delivers the pizza and turns around and says, ‘I’m a star!’ That was the first time that kind of recognition, vis-à-vis TV and the real world, was shown.”
Trying to poke a hole in Pacino’s selection, Grobel pressed him for another one, exploiting a loophole that saw the first two entries in Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal trilogy count as a single entry. After briefly flirting with Dick Tracy of all things, the star opted for The Local Stigmatic instead, which has always been the project closest to his heart.
