Word: cagney
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Does Bakersfield P.D. have a future? The show is probably too gentle and unassertive to inspire the sort of grass-roots campaign that saved or extended shows like Brooklyn Bridge and Cagney & Lacey. Levin thinks the subject matter makes it a tough sell. "Nobody wants to see ineffective cops," he theorizes. "In the days of Car 54, Where Are You? people didn't have to lock their doors or their car. Today there's violence and fear and crime everywhere, and nobody wants to see a cop who can't make a decision." Maybe not, but who says every show...
...told more than once, Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) gained his education almost entirely on the streets of Spanish Harlem. That is too bad. If he had spent more time at home watching the old Late Show, he would have known from the early gangster movies (especially James Cagney's) that there comes a moment in any criminal career when it becomes impossible to go straight, no matter how much you want to. It's an image problem with tragic dimensions...
...Carlito needs more than a good woman to avoid recidivism. He needs Pat O'Brien. You remember Pat O'Brien, Cagney's superego, trying to keep his wayward pal on a righteous path. What Carlito has instead is his friend and shyster lawyer, Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn, in a terrific performance). He is in too far with the Mob, and he needs Carlito's muscular help in a cockamamie plan to avoid gangland's vengeance. It goes awry, naturally, and Carlito's subsequent flight brings out the best in De Palma -- breathless, bravura moviemaking, intricately designed, but playing like...
...force you to lean in a little in order to catch their meaning. Pacino, + instead, leans on you, and though his boldness is sometimes impressive, in its calculated way there is also something overweening about it. There's almost no vulnerability about him, and that quality was what kept Cagney in a viewer's good graces. It is why Cagney's hoodlums seemed touched by tragedy, while Carlito seems touched only by technique. There is an irony here: an actor's bruising desire to transcend type is what prevents a very ambitious and otherwise skillful movie from transcending its genre...
...everyone is swept up in the excitement. A review in the trade publication Advertising Age, while admiring the special effects, argues that the commercial's hyperkinetic promotional jingle "obscures the lyrics and thus also the explanation for why -- apart from sheer gee-whizardry -- Cagney, Satchmo and Bogart are resurrected." In short, it's not enough for commercials to showcase creativity -- they've got to move the goods as well...