Al Pacino explains the one performance that “took on its own life”
It takes a lot of actors a long time to achieve greatness, but as it applied to Al Pacino, everybody knew less than a decade after he’d made his feature-length debut that he was well on his way to going down in history as an all-time talent.
The year after his screen debut in an episode of procedural drama N.Y.P.D., Pacino notched his first cinema credit in 1969’s drama Me, Natalie. His next outing marked his maiden leading role in The Panic in Needle Park before his third-ever movie role turned him into a household name when he played Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather.
He followed that up with a criminally overlooked turn in road trip dramedy Scarecrow before his subsequent three films saw him deliver a trio of the best big screen turns of the 1970s in Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and Dog Day Afternoon. A mere six years after he was basically a nobody, Pacino was a four-time Academy Award nominee celebrated as one of his generation’s finest performers.
That’s even more impressive when considering the decade was stacked to the rafters with heavyweights cut from a similar cloth, ranging from Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman to Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson. All of them – Pacino included, of course – are among the best to have ever graced the silver screen, but one of the latter’s fondness memories came from circumstances out of his control.
Sydney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon was inspired by a true story, with Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik finding himself so out of his depth when trying to rob a bank that he finds himself orchestrating a hostage situation of his own inadvertent making. When the authorities and media arrive on the scene, it evolves into something else entirely, with the “Attica! Attica! Attica!” scene seared into the collective consciousness.
As the star explained to GQ, he had no idea that the sequence was going to become one of the most memorable moments of his entire storied career, but the vastly experienced Lumet had an inkling. “I love the random, crazy, wild thing it became out there,” he admitted, even if he was blindsided by his repeated cries of ‘Attica’ becoming a cultural phenomenon in itself.
Pacino shared that Lumet knew what was coming, though, having approached his leading man after the scene had been shot and telling him, “Al, it’s out of our hands, buddy, it’s out of our hands.” Sure enough, once the actor had witnessed the way audiences responded to his grandstanding Dog Day Afternoon showcase, he knew the filmmaker was completely correct.
“It just took on its own life, and he knew it,” Pacino said of Lumet’s inkling that the scene was going to become the enduring iconography of the movie, a preternatural sense of knowing what works that comes from decades spent on the upper echelons of the directorial ladder.