Word: pacino
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...BOTTOM LINE: By turns a lisping potentate and a nervy novelist, Al Pacino gives the season's foremost star turn...
When he blazed to Broadway stardom and a Tony Award in 1969 playing an embittered drug addict in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, Al Pacino showed a menacing fire. Three years later, in the most memorable of his six Oscar- nominated film roles, he revealed an even scarier core of ice as a Mafia don in the making in The Godfather. His intelligence, energy, aura of command and eerie humor should have made him America's leading classical actor. Instead, his career has been one of ample accomplishment but unfulfilled promise...
...worst, Pacino has let himself degenerate into the mere sum of his quirks -- short stature emphasized by a rolling, shambling gait, gargling intonations, facial tics, a veritable thesaurus of hand gestures. At his best, as he is in a daring pair of roles now on Broadway, he recaptures with easy artlessness the range and power of his debut. One night he is a lisping, languorous biblical potentate, concealing deadly willfullness within a Bette Davis-like camp distraction, as King Herod in Oscar Wilde's Salome. The next night, in the new Chinese Coffee by the relatively unknown Ira Lewis, Pacino...
...intensely erotic, authentically nude. The beheading of John the Baptist at Salome's behest, after he has thwarted her lust, is sickening yet hypnotic -- and is based on biblical-era chronicles. The pervasive homosexual passion is faithful not only to Wilde but to the culture he portrays. Pacino presides with calculated distraction and studied effeminacy that drop away, as he betrays the wayward Salome, to reveal the steely cruelty of a conqueror...
...Pacino did not want the role, and Olmos obtained the movie rights in 1982. The director then went to work visiting prisons, where he said he was shocked to find that gangs, and not wardens, were in charge...