Pacino's way.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Actor Al Pacino - Column

One of the trailers for Brian DePalma's film "Carlito's Way" showcases not scenes from the picture, but titles of past movies featuring its star, Al Pacino. As the camera slowly pulls back from a tight close-up of the actor's eyes, viewers read the titles "The Godfather," "Dog Day Afternoon" "Serpico,"," "Scarface," and others, while Pacino's voice reverberates on the soundtrack. Indeed, "Carlito's Way" seems to raise questions not just about old-fashioned star power as a movie's chief box office draw, but about an actor's ability to reinvent himself, and even to become a film's principal author while having little control over screenplay or direction.

Pacino is an extraordinarily gifted artist, but he is also the type of dynamic personality associated at one time with the concept movie star." His dynamism is interwoven with the way he constantly rethinks his screen presence and links it to the articulation of the characters he portrays.

Looking at his films in aggregate, they seem to be about the trials of an ethnic New York street kid and his survival amid the vagaries of a cruel urban civilization. His first starring role, the black-and-white "Panic in Needle Park," set the tone. Shot on location in uptown Manhattan, this grim movie featured Pacino as a beleaguered drug addict bucking the odds against survival. As in much of his early work, it offered a side of Pacino quite different from the one cultivated in the 1980s. Here, he is a small, nasal, unassuming, slightly nerdish character a little intimidated by the world around him. Audiences and some critics tended to confuse Pacino in his early years with Dustin Hoffman, or even to suggest, quite unfairly, that he was a Hoffman ripoff.

In the "Godfather" trilogy, Serpico," and "Dog Day After- noon," which established Pacino's bona fides, he maintained this unassuming quality while cultivating a stronger, self-possessed, yet understated presence that drew on emotional energies associated with the Method. (Pacino, like Robert De Niro, Hoffman, and other actors of his generation, is one of the "sons of Brando.")

In "Dog Day Afternoon," Pacino gave a strong sample of the screen personality to come-a strung-out, over-the-top presence, suggesting an individual whose very being might be termed apocalyptic. ". . . And Justice for All," the tribulations of a New York defense attorney facing a corrupt, even bizarre system, showed Pacino pushing this inner apocalypse in a hyperbolic, caricatured...