Word: pacino
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...Shakespearean terms, this interpretation is an unconscionable outrage, yet it leaves a vivid comic impression. What makes Pacino dreadfully wrong for the role enhances what is prickingly funny about the way he plays it. In social mobility, this young (39) actor has come a long way upward from The Bronx, but no one has been able to mouthwash The Bronx from his speech patterns. From moment to moment, his urban streetside inflection breaks up the house, deliberately. Pacino has insufficient breath control to carry a Shakespearean line, so he spits out the poetry and mars the imagery. He strikes just...
...Pacino ought to have sprouted a long, pointy mustache for his Richard III so he could twirl it. Returning to the stage for this limited engagement (through July 15) at Broadway's Cort Theater, the man who mumbled so effectively through two Godfathers on-screen turns Shakespeare's "bunch-back'd toad" into a smarmy caricature villain out of silent movies and old comic strips; he personifies the sort of dastard who forecloses the mortgage on the family farm and threatens the virtue of fair young damsels...
...Pacino commits the cardinal sin of the actor by playing directly and shamelessly to the audience, even to the point of facial telegraphy with broad smirks, grins and grimaces. It is an attention-getting device for securing the playgoers' sympathy. As a result, the corrupt ambition and awful malignity of Richard are whittled away, and he appears as no more than a roguish prankster...
...portrayal of Teddy is as overblown as Michael Moriarty's star turn in Commissioner, he is such a bundle of stylized theatrical tics that Teddy's unpleasantness never becomes psychologically interesting. He is just a shrieking, obnoxious madman, an unintentional Mad magazine parody of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon...
...self-destruction. Superstars very often provide their own portfolio of legends to join the ones fashioned for the screen: the abandon of Brando, the hipster brashness of James Dean. If the material isn't available, then the superstars get tagged with it?De Niro is alleged to be Garboesque, Pacino sullen and distant, Redford some kind of Crunchy Granola mystic who holes up alone in Utah...