Relive the 1970s with 3 Pacino films
The Frank Banko Alehouse Cinemas at SteelStacks are making you an offer you can’t refuse: Three stone-cold classics starring Al Pacino.
On tap: “The Godfather” (1972), screening June 16 at noon; “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), screening June 19 at 7:15 P.M.; and “The Godfather: Part II” (1974), screening June 23 at noon.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” films, Pacino plays Michael Corleone, a man whose slide into corruption and cold-bloodedness are at the heart of the still-astonishing saga.
In the first movie, he’s a college boy, the only member of a Mafia family not drenched in blood.
He eventually joins the organization to avenge his father’s (Marlon Brando) shooting, and is never the same again, much to the horror of the woman (Diane Keaton) he loves. The sequel chronicles Michael’s tenure as the most melancholy and merciless of mob leaders.
“Dog Day Afternoon” features a much different Pacino. In the film, directed by Sidney Lumet, he plays a small-time criminal who decides to rob a Brooklyn bank in hopes of picking up enough cash to finance his lover’s (Chris Sarandon) sex-change operation. His antics draw the attention of onlookers and reporters, turning the crime scene into a circus.
In addition to showcasing Pacino, “The Godfather” films and “Dog Day Afternoon” also pay tribute to John Cazale, a remarkable actor who died in the prime of his career in 1978 from lung cancer. He only made five movies, and all were nominated for Best Picture Academy Awards. (The other two were “The Conversation” and “The Deer Hunter.”)
Cazale, who plays Fredo in “The Godfather” films and Pacino’s inept fellow bank robber in “Dog Day,” was in a relationship with Meryl Streep when he passed away.
In a 2009 documentary about Cazale, Streep paid tribute to her former boyfriend’s rare talent by saying, “He wasn’t like anybody I had ever met … it was the specificity of him and his humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion.”
Tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for students and seniors and $7.50 for ArtsQuest members. For more info, go to www.steelstacks.com.
“Eyes of Laura Mars” (1978, Mill Creek, R, $10) shouldn’t work, but it does. Directed by Irwin Kershner (“The Empire Strikes Back”) from a screenplay by John Carpenter (“Halloween”), it is occasionally silly and stuffed with unsympathetic characters. And yet there’s something compelling about the premise of a fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway) who fills her layouts with so much violence that she attracts the attentions of a serial killer.
Playing one of the film’s most prominent supporting roles is Wilkes-Barre native Darlanne Fluegel, a model-turned-actress best known for her roles in “Once Upon A Time In America” and Michael Mann’s “Crime Story” series. Fluegel, who was raised in Binghamton, New York, returned to the region often to visit her grandmother and to vacation at Harveys Lake. She died in 2017 at 64 of early-onset Alzheimer’s.
NEW TO BLU-RAY: Amy Longsdorf is a freelance writer.