Photofest / Quad Cinema

The Godfather (1972)

Pacino built on his incredible work as mafia boss Michael Corleone in 1974’s The Godfather Part II, but there aren’t many performances in the Hollywood canon as mesmerizing as the one he gave in the first film. Michael’s journey from idealistic World War II veteran to hard-hearted gangster is the emotional crux of Coppola’s crime saga, and Pacino sells it by never exploding with anger, or doing anything to make the transformation obvious. Instead, he makes his character’s development about control; Michael dominates every room he’s in by speaking very little, and wielding each word and command like a weapon.

It’s a titanic performance—he’s at once frighteningly godlike and recognizably human—but it’s one Pacino hasn’t really successfully given again, outside of the other Godfathers. With the role, he helped define a darker, more internal masculine ideal in Hollywood, distinguishing himself from the WASP-y idols he had beaten out for the part. Pacino, along with his Method cohorts like Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, was an entirely different kind of star, and he quickly built out his forceful screen persona with movies like Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) and Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (1973), and then cemented it with The Godfather Part II.

Photofest / Quad Cinema

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

If The Godfather remains Pacino’s most famous performance (on its release, it was the highest-grossing film in history, unseating Gone With the Wind), his portrayal of an amateur bank robber in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon is his most “Pacino” performance, all nervy energy and bouts of crazed shouting. The “Attica!” confrontation (which was ad-libbed) is an example, though, of just how much bigger Pacino would get in his later years. He slowly builds to that outburst, letting Sonny Wortzik’s fears mount until they spill into anger and paranoia. He wants to root the audience in his character’s flaws, knowing that’ll help every surprising plot turn feel natural. Pacino, practically unknown in 1971, got his fourth Oscar nomination for Dog Day Afternoon; from Needle Park to this is a fully unmatched run of acting work in Hollywood history.

Columbia Pictures

Bobby Deerfield (1977)

After that, Pacino took two years off before uniting with another major director (Sydney Pollack) for a romantic drama set in the world of racing, alongside Marthe Keller, whom he then dated. It was a colossal bomb, a strangely muted work that actually had very little to do with racing and was widely mocked by critics as a clumsy facsimile of contemporary European art cinema. Deerfield is interesting, if only fitfully rewarding, on rewatch (it’s one of the flops that Pacino felt should be included in the retrospective) partly because it’s one of the few times the actor comes close to the buttoned-down intensity of Michael Corleone. “It wasn’t a performance that was coming at you, but it was something personal, and it showed,” Pacino recently reflected on the film, which took him years to appreciate. “You saw something revealed in this character, low-key—something I was going through in my life at that time.”