Sonny Boy by Al Pacino
Reviewed by Hassan Akram
Al Pacino’s new memoir Sonny Boy reminded me in many ways of Charlie Chaplin’s Autobiography, published almost exactly sixty years earlier in September 1964. Here is the same grim childhood poverty, the febrile mentally ill mother, the absent father; the early experience of the theatre as an escape and then a profession; the move to films, the almost instant and phenomenal success; the elevation to sainthood by the next generation of stars and filmmakers; also, the lifelong struggle to form lasting sexual relationships, and the final affair with a woman a third of his age. There is even a likeness of prose style: beneath the idiosyncrasies of the self-taught writer and the distinctiveness of the film-star’s personality, both books possess a sincerely felt lyricism.
Of course, there are differences. Pacino is mostly an actor rather than an all-round filmmaker, he was never subject to McCarthyist persecution, and, even in the best of his performances, never created an icon as instantly familiar as the Little Tramp. Where the flaw with Chaplin’s prose was his verbosity, the problem with Pacino’s is his occasional clunkiness. He possesses, for instance, an indefatigable habit of opening his chapters with extreme close-ups (“At age eighteen, I was nursing a fifteen-cent beer at Martin’s Bar and Grill”; “I was standing in a field in Bakersfield, California”, etc.), which is out of tune with the flow of the rest of the narrative. If he is reticent with details, it is not, like Chaplin, about his personal life, but about his relationship with colleagues; for example, he doesn’t go into the reasons for his lack of rapport with Kitty Winn, Gene Hackman, and others, and glosses over Robert Duvall’s refusal to act in Godfather III. He mentions rumours only to debunk them, explaining, for instance, that his no-show to the 1973 Oscars ceremony was not a conscious snub but a decision taken while he was struggling with fame. In a sense it is refreshing to find a book like this so free from petty rivalries. It stands tall for its anecdotes, self-reflection, and often touching honesty. No Hollywood memoir since Chaplin’s has told the “log cabin to White House” story with such sincerity and charisma or with so little malice.
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Alfredo James Pacino was born in Harlem in 1940 to young Sicilian-American parents. His grandparents, first-generation immigrants, had arrived in New York at the turn of the century; his mother’s father had been born in Corleone, Sicily. When Al was two years old his parents separated. His father was largely absent, remarrying frequently, and the father-son relationship would remain awkward and on-and-off. He was raised on a scant state allowance by his mother and his grandparents in a cheap South Bronx apartment. It was a wretched place. In a childhood spent exploring the grime and decay of the postwar New York slums, one of his most disturbing memories is of being told, aged nine, by a friend that “Some guy peed in my mouth.” He was a smoker from the age of ten, and three of his closest friends died young from heroin abuse.
It was his mother who initiated his acting ambitions and stopped him immersing himself in street life. Without her, he reflects, he would most likely have gone the way of his friends. As it was, she took him regularly to the picture palaces, where he learned to impersonate the Old Hollywood actors he watched in grainy silver. At school, he performed in plays such as The Melting Pot, a story of Russian Jewish immigrant life in New York, and was told by a classmate, “Hey, kid, you’re the next Marlon Brando!” His high-school teacher became a mentor, spotting his potential, and telling his family that he “must be allowed to continue to act.” But for all his mother’s encouragement she struggled intensely with anxiety neurosis. When he was six, she attempted suicide. Ten years later, when she was abandoned by a fiancée, her neurosis worsened. Al quit school to work to pay for her electrotherapy treatment. He joined a moving company and hauled boxes for a living, balanced out by odd jobs as a theatre usher. It was not enough. In 1962 he lost his mother to an overdose – whether it was deliberate or accidental has never been established. He reflects:
My mother’s tragedy was poverty. She was stuck in the mud of it and couldn’t move. I knew she had the innate intelligence and sensitivity to understand our world… But she was a lonely woman. Therapy, moderation, security – these things could have helped her. I knew I was going to be able to supply her with that and more. And I don’t think I ever told her that. I don’t think I ever told her that I was going to succeed and was going to take care over her.
Pacino never gave up on his acting. It provided escapism and exhilaration, “the living spirit of energy.” After his mother died, he shared an apartment with Martin Sheen and came under the wing of a teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio, Charlie Laughton. The stage also gave him a love of reading, and he ploughed through Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. “If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me.” He got more and more parts onstage. His acting credentials and Sicilian roots led Elia Kazan to audition him for America, America, though nothing came of the project, and it is worth noting that his ethnic background brought him hostility as well as opportunity. When working at a theatre, for instance, his manager told him bluntly that he looked “too Mexican”, and later fired him on a flimsy pretext.
His first lead role was in a Broadway production of Israel Horovitz’s play The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968), for which he and his co-star John Cazale won Obie Awards. Here he caught the eye of Hollywood. Faye Dunaway, having just finished Bonnie and Clyde, became a fan. A teleplay, Crime on the Streets, marked his first role onscreen. This was 1968. The film industry was rapidly evolving. The energy, the realism, the originality of New Hollywood – up against the quaint decadence of the Old – was clear to Pacino when he watched Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate in 1967. His own film debut came two years later, with the role of a random partygoer in Me, Natalie (1969), a coming-of-age comedy with Patty Duke. “I danced with Patty and said my lines to her. ‘You have a nice body, you know that? Listen, do you put ot?’ – and had absolutely no understanding of what the fuck I was talking about or why I was saying it or what it would look like.”
The first lead role came two years later with The Panic in Needle Park (1971). This grainy piece of documentary realism tracks the on-and-off affair between two New York heroin addicts, Bobby (Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn). In spite of its unflinchingly graphic view of addiction and vivid understanding of city subcultures, the film is no more than a social document, which would have been forgotten by now if not for Pacino’s part in it. In the character of Bobby – introduced as a harmless romancer with a lively wit, who is withered by addiction into an obsessive, resentful abuser – there is a definite foretaste of Michael Corleone, of the image of gradual moral degradation which Pacino embodies so well.
What followed, with his casting as Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, was his greatest success. In Pacino’s performances from The Godfather onwards there is always one tiny detail which stands out in the memory, the artist’s touch, the subtle twitch of character which is barely noticeable at first but completely immerses him in the narrative. In The Godfather this moment occupies barely a handful of frames of film. Outside the hospital where Don Corleone is recovering, Michael and his ally Enzo have just warded off a group of would-be assassins. Lighting Enzo’s cigarette, Michael sees that his own hand is calm while the other’s is quaking, and it dawns on him, pivotally, that he is uniquely tempered to deal with the adrenaline and danger of a life of crime. His look of realisation lasts only a second, but this is the moment at which, psychologically, he becomes his father’s son.
The success of The Godfather was immediate and electric. Never before or since has mass-market appeal (gangsters, shoot-outs, blood, sex) and cinematic art (rich motifs, painting-like cinematography, endless thematic and political readings) been so perfectly balanced. The story of the Corleones is an inverted picture of the American dream: they, like anyone else, pursue success, wealth, family, and a better life for their children – except that they happen to be a crime syndicate. There is no better showing up of the logical end of the American dream – not even The Great Gatsby manages it so well. It is a film about gangsters, but also one about corruption, power, betrayal, succession, revenge, religion, marriage, generational change, filial duty, sibling rivalry, the immigrant experience, laissez-faire capitalism, and “the American dream”. It became the highest grossing film ever. Pacino was nominated for an Oscar. Anonymity vanished. He was stopped and recognised in shops, in restaurants, on the pavement. At a street-crossing one day he caught the eye of a red-haired girl and smiled at her. “Hello, Michael,” she replied. Having fame thrust upon him would upset his mental balance. A period of substance abuse followed. He experimented with drugs and, in regular stupors, would make rash decisions, rejecting, for instance, a part in Dog Day Afternoon when it was first offered to him. His personal life collapsed. He separated from Jill Clayburgh, his partner of five years. “I drank and drugged, she didn’t. I took her for granted.” He started having blackouts and panic attacks. When his friend gave him the news of his first major award for The Godfather, his limp reply was, “Do you have the name of a psychiatrist? Because I need one.” He had five sessions every week with a psychiatrist in Boston. He would eventually recuperate, but only after The Godfather: Part II (1974) upset his mental balance even further.
If The Godfather was a tragedy of succession (i.e. however much he resents it, Michael is always destined to become just like his father), then in Part II the themes take on even more Shakesperean, even Biblical, proportions. The parallel structure, which intertwines Michael’s story with flashbacks to his father Vito’s (Robert De Niro) youth, shows the past as running parallel with present, and by extension shows the reciprocity between them. If the first film is about Michael acquiring more and more of his father’s vices, the second one is about him retaining fewer and fewer of his father’s virtues. We are shown repeatedly how, when young Vito comes home from murdering a rival, his first thought is to fondle his son – effectively a baptism in blood – and how, in moments of reflection, Michael constantly thinks back to the examples set by his father. But where Vito kills to avenge an injustice or protect his family, Michael kills ruthlessly to consolidate his power-base and ends by committing fratricide. Michael, Pacino reflects, was “very difficult to find in your own soul.” Before filming, his real-life relationship with actress Tuesday Weld had also recently ended, and he was still distraught over it. He became depressed and withdrawn. The soullessness and alienation is imprinted in the film, in his pudgy, pale face and sunken, morose eyes. “I leave Godfather: Part II with Michael very possibly the most powerful man in America,” said Coppola. “But he is a corpse.”
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Between and beyond the Godfathers, Pacino’s career was shooting rapidly upwards. Having turned down the roles of Han Solo and Billy the Kid, he worked with Gene Hackman in Scarecrow (1973), a minor film whose one great merit is the onscreen chemistry between the co-stars. After getting to know Frank Serpico, one of the first American police officers to talk openly about institutional corruption, Pacino was keen to play him in what became Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), a gritty, fragmented film about an incorruptible policeman in a brutal network of city-wide corruption which culminates in a successful scheme by his colleagues to have him shot. Serpico is morally sympathetic, but he ends up, like most Pacino characters, in a kind of degradation. He grows so obsessed with his integrity and his thirst for justice that he ends up isolated in the professional sphere and morose and frustrated in the domestic one. But they grew on each other, and would collaborate again to even better effect two years later.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) features “a firecracker of a script” and, like Serpico, is a New York crime thriller based on a true story. It is also a strongly anti-establishment film and belongs very much to the mid-1970s, when post-Watergate, post-Vietnam mass cynicism towards authority in the US reached its peak. It is also, like other Pacino films in this period, steeped in its New York setting. By 1975 one of the great cities of the world had become a cesspit. This was the era of the New York Debt Crisis: financial woes, high crime, blackouts, strikes, riots, underfunding, corruption, all things which contributed to the distinctive grit of films like Dog Day Afternoon. Sidney Pollack’s paranoid anti-state thriller, Three Days of the Condor, would be released a month later. In Afternoon, Pacino plays Sonny, a gay man who robs a bank in order to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation, and comes into conflict with state authority. As with Michael Corleone, the role engulfed him. The night before filming commenced, Pacino drank feverishly and paced his room, working himself into enough of a state for cast members to ask frankly whether he was having a nervous breakdown. The sweating, frenetic, liquid-eyed Sonny is vivid because Pacino understands his essential good nature in bad circumstances. “I’m a Catholic, I don’t want to hurt nobody,” he says, waving a gun at a pack of hostages.
Dog Day Afternoon was his final collaboration with John Cazale, who died of lung cancer in 1978, aged only forty-two. The pair had been friends since living together as stage-actors in the late 1960s, and three of Cazale’s five films had been Pacino collaborations. They played brothers in the Godfathers and crime partners in Dog Day Afternoon; in each case Cazale’s character had been killed while Pacino’s was left to mourn. Even here in Sonny Boy, he cannot bring himself to talk about the death of his friend. “All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life,” he reflected in 2003. “He was my acting partner.” The vulnerability of this period is visible in Bobby Deerfield (1977), made while Pacino was weaning off his alcoholism and Cazale was in declining health. The role of the eponymous Deerfield, a Formula 1 driver who is terrified of death and develops trauma after seeing colleagues killed and paralysed in an accident, “remains to me one of my more revealing performances… with all my strange residue – my pain and depression from this period.”
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Into the 1980s, Pacino entered a relationship with Kathleen Quinlan, the closest he ever came to married life. They spent two years together. She eased his mind while he was making the last great film of his “early period.” Based on an influential Howard Hawks film which was based in turn on a Prohibition-era pulp novel, Scarface (1983) depicts, formulaically, the meteoric rise and fall of a Cuban-American gangster in the Miami underworld. Tony Montana, with his mangled accent, shrill paranoia, cocaine-heaped table, impulsive killing, and semi-incestuous grip on his sister, has none of Michael Corleone’s subtlety. He is a caricature. He is, however, at least as quotable as Michael (“Say hello to my little friend”). Scarface has always had a popular appeal (especially among drug lords). It is gritty, racy, and vivid, propelled through a near three-hour runtime by sheer force of storytelling. Fans like to think of it as an attack on Reaganite neoliberalism, just as the original film had (doubtfully) been an attack on Depression-era inequality. “We were mocking the whole idea of trickle-down economics and the grab-everything-you-can philosophy of the moment,” Pacino writes. There may be something in this, even if the message is buried under an ocean-tide of cocaine, blood, bullets, and the dynamism of the lead performance. Scarface was followed by a period drama called Revolution, which failed so completely that he did not make another film for four years, restricting himself exclusively to the theatre*.* Finding himself “broke” (“I had about ninety grand in the bank and that was it”) he returned to films in 1989.
The productions of Pacino’s “middle period” – roughly the 1990s – receive less attention here than the earlier work. Indeed, there was a definite drop in the average standard, because so many of the films of this period are stale reheats of former successes. Carlito’s Way (1993) is directed by Brian De Palma of Scarface, and the main character, Carlito, an ex-con desperate to leave the criminal life for which he is destined, is a second-rate Michael Corleone. There are some memorable scenes but the film never ceases to feel mechanical. So also, to varying degrees, with Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Heat (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Any Given Sunday (1999), and other films from this period. Their formulaic, commercialised style was summed up by Marty Bregman: “You want a successful film? Put Pacino on the poster with a gun.” It is not that Pacino’s performances ever grew mechanical or that he lost his art of grasping the core of a human being. In each outing there is at least one brilliant facet of character which no one else could have realised, for example the unspoken cocaine addiction in Heat or the sales-seduction scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. The problem is simply that the films are never “great”. Even Looking for Richard (1996), a half-documentary about the enduring value of Shakespeare, which Pacino wrote, directed, and starred in, won some critical recognition but ultimately failed – the only time a box-office rejection or a lacerating review really stung him.
He did, however, have some conditional successes in this period – The Godfather: Part III (1990), for example*.* He struggles to disguise the fact that he readopted the role of Michael Corleone for money, admitting as much at first, then padding out the rest of the page with coy phrases like “interesting challenge” and “good script.” In Part III Michael’s off-stage journey from fratricidal mobster to repentant sexagenarian is never properly explained. It is not credible. As a result, the entire basis for the film is crushed. Even the harrowing final scenes – Michael’s reaction when his daughter is shot and his later death alone in Sicily – play too overtly to the conventional punishment-of-the-hood ending which was enforced by the Hayes Code in pre-Godfather gangster films, and so cannot be taken as seriously as the full-circle irony of the first film or the silent rumination of the second.
For Scent of a Woman (1992), his most significant film of the 1990s, Pacino won his only Oscar. He plays Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a blind man who goes on a joyriding, womanising, fine-dining jaunt in New York. He is irascible, boyish, tyrannical, straight-talking, violent, charming, and outrageously dirty – “a role,” as Empire magazine put it, “that might have been generated by a Going For Oscar computer programme.” His turn as the blind colonel recalls the performance of Edward G. Robinson, another typecast Hollywood gangster, as Captain Larson in The Sea Wolf (1941), another blind suicidal leader who forms an infinitely complex psychological character study. Pacino’s is the stronger performance. Devoting himself to the part, he studied and spoke extensively to blind people about their daily lives, frustrations, and coping mechanisms. He also learnt the tango. Though he admits to overacting, he says it would have been worse if not for the moderating influence of director Martin Brest, “a gem of a guy.”
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This book, like life, speeds up as it goes along. The accounts Pacino gives of his “later period”, of the thirty or so films in which he has appeared since 2000, are patchy and distracted. This is probably justified. Most of his roles have been bit parts, and even the most memorable of them, like the charismatic swindler Willy Bank in Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), are nothing to rival the performances of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Some of the highlights include an outing as Shylock in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, in which he interpreted the character, accurately, as not a typical Bard villain but as a victim of antisemitism; his rendering of the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is among the most powerful impressions of Shakespeare on celluloid. But it is a fact that if Pacino had retired in 2000 his reputation today would stand quite as high as it does.
In some senses this is not his fault, but the outcome of a broader restructuring which has taken place in American cinema. A great part of the mass appeal of The Godfather, Scarface, etc., lies, obviously, in their emphasis on masculinity; and Pacino, who made his name as a gangster, a macho, a “tough guy”, is likely to have suffered from the decreasing emphasis on masculinity in the mainstream. The environment has changed. A film like The Godfather, which earnestly contains the line, “Women and children can afford to be careless but not men”, would not succeed or win praise so easily today. It may be that the change is only superficial, but masculinity is no longer the dominant force of cinema that it was fifty years ago.
Significantly his three greatest successes of recent years – The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (both 2019) and House of Gucci (2021) - are period pieces, set between the 1950s and the 1970s. In other words, they are anachronisms. The Irishman could have been made fifty years earlier with much the same cast and crew. Of the ten highest grossing films of the same year as The Irishman, 2019, four were comic-book movies and six were sequels*.* Fifty years earlier, when Pacino debuted in Me, Natalie, the ten highest grossing films had been an assortment of Westerns, comedies, and musicals, three of which – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider – are preserved in the United States National Film Registry. It is unlikely that any such fate will meet the blockbusters of 2019. From that contrast alone one can gauge what a change has taken place in the last half-century of film. Pacino, a product of the New Wave, has survived into an era in which the studio system is resurgent, and soulless, glossy, mass-produced popcorn films have hegemonised the box office.
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Is Pacino a “great” actor? Will he be remembered as the star of his generation? Although he possesses a vivid understanding of motives and character, he is often guilty of over-acting (Scarface, Scent of a Woman, The Devil’s Advocate), and he lacks the ability to make each character a separate human being. This sounds absurd at first, until one considers what is meant by making each character a separate human being. The great method actors were in a constant struggle to erase their own personalities. In Marlon Brando’s case, it is literally impossible, without actual knowledge, to tell that Stanley Kowalski and Vito Corleone are played by the same man, so completely does he efface himself from his performance. But with Pacino it is immediately possible to see the same personality behind Michael Corleone, Frank Slade, Jimmy Hoffa, or any one of his characters. It could be a crack in the voice or a look in the eyes, but something always betrays that he is the same man.Even from this memoir the reader carries away the distinct impression of a voice, a personality, a face behind the page, which significantly is the same face as that behind all of his characters. In this sense he has less in common with any method actor than with an Old Hollywood personality like Chaplin. The persona which he has built up and imprinted onto miles of celluloid will be his greatest legacy.
Perhaps this is part of his personal appeal. Perhaps it explains why, as much as any star of his generation, he commands the respect of his Hollywood contemporaries and successors. A glance at the promo material for Sonny Boy is enough to gauge the extent of his influence and following. Martin Scorsese: “Al Pacino is magical.” Samuel L. Jackson: “Al is money, the man in charge, making it happen. I got to act with Al Pacino and it was worth more to me than anything.” Johnny Depp: “comedic, talented, and certifiably insane.” Pacino himself is aware of his status. He is larger than life and knows it. Reflecting on his work with Brad Pitt and Leonardo Di Caprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he quips that “I believe they think I’m someone else.” On another occasion, when asked how he got to be famous, he responds: “I was in The Godfather, man. What do you expect? If you were in it, you’d be famous.”
But is this larger-than-life quality – this ineffaceable “Pacino-ness” – a flaw or a feature? Perhaps Pacino belongs to the tradition not of disappearance in acting, but of magnification. A Golden Age star such as Cary Grant never vanished into his characters, yet many of his colleagues who did so never became icons. Likewise, Humphrey Bogart’s “Bogart-ness” became his signature rather than his limitation. These actors did not efface themselves: they distilled themselves into something archetypal that resonated across roles and generations. Pacino’s volcanic energy, his ability to simmer before erupting, has created more cinematic touchstones than almost any other actor of his generation. His “Hoo-ah!” from Scent of a Woman and his “Say hello to my little friend!” from Scarface have transcended their films to become part of our collective vocabulary. This is one form of greatness: to create moments so powerful that they transcend the boundaries of film. Moreover, what might otherwise be called “overacting” in Pacino could well be a willingness to risk embarrassment for the sake of more striking performances. When he goes big – as in his Satan in The Devil’s Advocate or his speech in Any Given Sunday – he taps into something operatic that few actors would dare attempt. His fearlessness becomes a virtue, but even so it should not overshadow his capacity for nuance. The quiet menace of Michael Corleone in the first Godfather stands in contrast to the explosive Frank Slade. His defeated slouch in Donnie Brasco indicates with economy a lifetime of disappointment. Perhaps Pacino’s legacy is not that he created distinct human beings but that he revealed different facets of humanity through the prism of his own distinct personality. In doing so, he may have achieved something rarer than versatility: authenticity.
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In old age, however, his concern is not with the movies. In the later sections of the book he grows introspective and thinks less and less about professional life. Much more time is spent detailing fatherhood than cinema. He has four children, two with Beverly D’Angelo, one with Jan Tarrant, and, most recently, in 2023, one with Noor Alfallah. It was for his youngest son, Roman Pacino, that he wrote this book. The absence of a father figure in his own youth, the constant search for a mentor, Marty Bregman, Charlie Laughton, Lee Strasberg, might have impelled him to write. He wants to be present in the life of his newborn but admits that “I’m a man who has limited time left, let’s face it.” In this view, Sonny Boy is much more powerful than it would be as a glitzy celebrity memoir.
The introspective, intimate tone of the final sections is actually very moving. Pacino describes his lifelong experience of Fuchs’ dystrophy, which blurs and distorts his vision and worsens with age. He finds in the mirror “an old wolf with a snarl and a mountain of white hair.” He recalls that in 2020 he had a near-death experience after contracting Covid; for several minutes his pulse ceased. He falls involuntarily into memories of childhood, and thinks about revisiting the Bronx where he grew up. But he knows that the world of his childhood, the slums of postwar New York, no longer exists. In daily life there is no evidence but his memory that it ever did exist, and his only way to relive that world is to set it down on paper. The very final chapter grows fragmented, breaking into stanzas of poetry, concluding:
My whole life was a moonshot. This life is a dream, as Shakespeare says… If I’m lucky enough, if I get to heaven perhaps, I’ll get to reunite with my mother there. All I want is the chance to walk up to her, look in her eyes, and simply say, ‘Hey, Ma, see what happened to me?’