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John Cazale, with his rugged face and cobblestone forehead, was one of the most memorable character actors of the 1970s, but his career was tragically short-lived. He appeared in only five feature films, all of which were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. He is best known for playing Fredo Corleone, the weak-willed brother, in the first two Godfather films, but also played anxious friends in The Conversation and Dog Day Afternoon, and the character who doesn’t go to Vietnam in The Deer Hunter, which came out just eight months after his death from cancer in 1978. He was just forty-two.
John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon. Photo from TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy
Cazale excelled at playing men with obvious flaws—timid, cowardly, stupid—as opposed to the more charismatic heroes played by Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, or Robert De Niro. But he did it with pathos, humor, and a kind of heartbreaking naiveté, even when playing villains and scoundrels. (In Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino’s bank robber asks Cazale, as his assistant, what country he’d like to escape to, and he whispers, “Wyoming.” The line was supposedly improvised.) In 1976, Cazale met the young stage actress Meryl Streep while they were working together on Measure for Measure in Central Park, and they fell madly in love; Streep followed Cazale into the cast of The Deer Hunter for her first starring film role, and stayed with him until the end. In this film, Cazale is clearly suffering from illness, but this only enhances his performance as the sad fool in a gang of macho brothers. Like Fredo, he is also the outsider in the family, unable to live up to the family's brutal machismo until his path of vice leads him to a tragic end.
In honor of Cazale’s 90th birthday and his ever-growing legend, Film Forum will screen all five of his films, plus Richard Shepard’s 2009 documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, from June 13 to 19. (Shepard will appear at select screenings, and I’ll be premiering The Deer Hunter on the 16th.) It’s an opportunity not only to revisit some of the New Hollywood’s cool classics, but also to take a closer look at the man who stands in the shadows, imbuing his unglamorous characters with deliciously graceful notes. — Michael Schulman
Sourse: newyorker.com
