The list of offenses is long, but letâs start with his jacket. It is a rich shade of burgundy, the color of a bruise, and not remotely flattering to the pale body it covers. Throughout the pitiful non-heist in âDog Day Afternoonâ (1975), while everyone else in the un-air-conditioned bank sheds layers or unbuttons blouses, the jacket stays put, getting soggier and dirtier. The robber is still wearing it when he scolds a hostage for smoking. âIf I die of cancer, itâll be half your fault,â she teases. âNo,â he mutters, echoing what some teacher or parent must have told him long ago, âitâs because youâre weak.â Everything about this character, who goes by Sal, is pathetic, unless itâs repugnant. There is no reason for us to sympathize with him, and therefore we do. The hostages do, too: just before he gets shot in the head, one of them gives him a rosary and tells him not to be scared. We donât need to be told that Sal has been scared his entire life.
Three years after the filmâs release, the actor John Cazale died of cancer at the age of forty-twoâmuch too young, but old enough to have played Sal and done impeccable supporting work in âThe Conversation,â âThe Deer Hunter,â and the first two âGodfatherâ films. In his five cinematic roles, he endangers countless lives, waves a gun in a friendâs face for no reason, steps on a brideâs wedding dress for no reason, leers and whines and bullies and snivels and beds cocktail waitresses two at a time. But there is something almost adorable, even saintly, about the way he sins. If I worked in a bank, I know who I would want to rob me.
âFrom the moment you see him onscreen . . . heâs so strange-looking.â The speaker is Steve Buscemi, one of the principal talking heads of âI Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale,â a 2009 documentary that helped inspire a fresh flurry of interest in the actorâs short career. Buscemi is not wrong. Cazaleâs forehead was a vast wilderness. His hair was a haunted wood. His eyes were black holes from which no light ever returned. Letâs be clear, though: strange compared with who? If you noticed someone like Cazale on the subway, you wouldnât blink. In the room Iâm sitting in as I write this, there are at least two people who could easily be related to him. He was an everyday-looking person in a profession where beauty is the default and everyday means bizarre. Hair-splitting? Possibly, but weâre also getting to the gist of what made him so good.
Revisiting Cazaleâs films, the subject of a new series at Metrograph, convinced me that he was and still is Hollywoodâs undisputed master of the everyday. I donât mean everyman acting à la Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks, where the main qualifications are being handsome and preternaturally charismatic. Cazale excelled, instead, at playing people who are weak, weird, unprincipled, and visibly uncomfortable in their own skins. Like I said, everyday.
The late sixties and early seventies were a good time for actors who looked nothing like Hollywood but went there anyway. (This was the era when Dustin Hoffman beat out Robert Redford for the lead in âThe Graduate.â) For most of the sixties, Cazale acted Off Broadway and made extra money as a cabdriver or as a messenger for Standard Oil, where one of his co-workers happened to be Al Pacino. Frazzled, big-city abjection was an early specialtyâin Israel Horovitzâs âThe Indian Wants the Bronx,â he gets roughed up (by Pacino, no less) while waiting for a bus. By 1971, the year the casting director Fred Roos told Francis Ford Coppola that Cazale would make a good Fredo Corleone, the actor had two Obie Awards. A few seasons too soon or too late and he may not have transitioned to film so gracefully.
Cazaleâs timing was excellent. His self-awareness was better. From the jump, he knew what he was good at: being odd but never in a grand way, the wonky yardstick by which the other charactersâ tortured depths are measured. When we meet Cazale in âThe Conversation,â weâve already been introduced to Gene Hackman, the lead. But Cazale is the one who shows us what kind of movie this will be. âYou goinâ to the convention tomorrow?â he asks as he crouches in his truck, tapping at surveillance equipment, and immediately we understand that weâre watching espionage without a drop of James Bond, espionage as a nine-to-five with small talk and coffee breaks. Cazaleâs character is a creep, of course, but a creep you could get a beer with. As if to underscore the point, he later invites Hackman, who plays his devoutly religious boss, out for a drink. Hackman turns him down and scolds him for taking the name of the Lord in vain. In the Vietnam War epic âThe Deer Hunter,â Cazaleâs dynamic with Robert De Niro isnât so different; his purpose is to act life-size so that De Niro can be colossally tragic. When the two steelworkers go hunting in the mountains, the sound of De Niroâs shout fills the emptiness like a thunderstorm. Cazaleâs squawk couldnât fill a paper bag.
There is nothing in movies like that squawk. It cracks and shakes, as though with the memory of some gruesome injury. In Cazaleâs most famous scene from âThe Godfather: Part II,â Michael Corleone (Pacino) stands and barely opens his mouth. Fredo slouches in his chair, as though on a psychiatristâs couch, and vomits up what heâs been mumbling under his breath for years:
It is hard to know how much to say about a speech that has been analyzed for the last half century, so Iâll limit myself to two points. The first is the way that Cazaleâs right arm flops around like a fish in a boatâhe canât control his own body, let alone the Corleone empire. The second point is so obvious that only a brilliant actor could make us forget it: at this stage in the movie, we should root for Michael and hate Fredo. Michael is the dutiful son who works day and night to provide for his family. Fredo has never worked for anything. His stupidity almost got two of his family members killed. The only thing he has going for him is the one that matters most: Michael is a machine, and Fredo is one of us. Side against him at your own peril.
The war between âusâ (despicable but still human) and the machine people (in the right but sociopathic) is more or less the point of âDog Day Afternoon,â Cazaleâs third film with Pacino and the one where he pushed past ordinary humdrum brilliance and made it all the way to perfection. As Sonny, the lead bank robber, Pacino gets most of the juicy scenes and theme-baring lines: âYâknow, the guy who kills me, I hope he does it âcause he hates my guts, not âcause itâs his job,â he tells a cyborgian F.B.I. agent who is clearly this filmâs true villain. Nevertheless, as Sal, Cazale has the tougher part, working in nanoseconds and millimetres and making them all count. He waves his gun and squawks at the bankâs secretaries; they scream, of course, and his eyes widen almost subliminally. When Sonny asks Sal if there is anybody he wants to call on the phone before they flee the country, Cazale refuses to milk the moment for pathos. After thinking for a few beats, no longer or harder than youâd think about what you had for breakfast today, he shakes his head. He canât begin to understand whatâs wrong with himself. But if you donât look at this man and see parts of yourself, the ones you can barely stand to think about, I humbly suggest that you are not really trying. On behalf of anyone who has ever been brushed off or stepped over, all the damaged kids limping through adulthood, all the poor souls who still havenât figured out what to do with their arms when theyâre having a conversation: te salut, Don Cazale. Everyday doesnât come to Hollywood every day. â¦