Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Al Pacino's first film as a protagonist was shot when he was thirty under the orders of Jerry Schatzberg, playing Bobby, a heroin-addicted drug dealer who hangs out with other colleagues in New York's Needle Park. Pacino declared that during filming he drank a lot and that he appeared drunk on set on several occasions, but that he never used heroin as was rumored. The actor has said that it is one of his favorite movies of his entire career. Undoubtedly, a role that was quite a challenge for the beginning interpreter, whose performance caught the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola.
The saga 'The Godfather (1972-1974-1990)
Undoubtedly, the stroke of luck in his career was that Coppola insisted to the producers of The Godfather that Pacino was the ideal actor to play Michael Corleone, the young son of mobster Don Vito, who is embarking on a military career and wants nothing to do with it. initially of his father's shady business. However, a series of circumstances will lead him to follow in the family's footsteps and position himself as the head of the clan.
The virtually unknown Pacino managed to prevail over the wishes of the producers to sign more well-known faces such as Robert Redford or Jack Nicholson and his work earned him a nomination for best supporting actor in The Godfather and as an actor in The Godfather II. His Michael Corleone made him a star overnight.
Frank Serpico was an upstanding New York police officer who worked for several years on the streets undercover and exposed the corruption that existed in the city's police department, earning him many enemies. For the role of him based on the true story of this incorruptible agent, the actor patrolled for three months with real agents through the most dangerous streets of the Big Apple and earned his first best actor nomination. The award went to Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger.
Dog Afternoon (1975)
To play a small-time robber at the end of his strength in Sidney Lumet's film, Pacino slept only two hours a day during the entire shoot so that his face reflected the exhaustion of a character who has just become the protagonist of a show for live television. He third Oscar nomination for best actor in a drama based on a real bank robbery that occurred in Brooklyn in 1972 in which he again coincided with John Cazale, his brother Fredo in the Godfather saga.
Justice for All (1979)
Under Norman Jewison, he built a standout role as a Baltimore lawyer trying to defend an alleged rapist in a corrupt courtroom. He shared filming with his teacher Lee Strasberg, his grandfather in fiction and earned his fourth nomination for the golden statuette for best actor.
The Price of Power (1983)
His first job with Brian De Palma was in this cult film written by Oliver Stone in which he played Tony Montana, a cold and ruthless Cuban emigrant who settles in Miami to become a major gangster, so he can earn money. money and position. To prepare his character, a heroin dealer, he required the team members to address him in Spanish. At one point in the film he defined himself as "a political prisoner from Cuba who claims my human rights." In the final shootout scene, he was so into his role that he suffered second-degree burns to his hands from the flames from his gun and didn't realize it until he finished shooting it. He was accompanied in the cast by Michelle Pfeiffer and Steven Bauer.
