Peter Sellers and more
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ShareThere was a time when Pacino was a good actor, maybe even the best film actor in America. That was before, of course, his rather “loud” and exasperating roles in films such as Scarface, Dick Tracy, and Scent of a Woman and nearly two decades of onscreen hollering (his performances in Heat and Angels in America being possibly exceptions). However, the deep and resourceful actor that Pacino used to be—and perhaps can again be—is best demonstrated in Dog Day Afternoon. In this film we have Pacino at his very best, acting with subtly and genuine humanity. He plays Sonny, a guy who holds up a bank in order to pay for his male lover’s sex change operation. Over the course of the film, Pacino takes us on an emotional roller coaster, giving a performance that is packed full of fear, excitement, anger and love—often all in the same scene.
Interestingly, Pacino supposedly refused to act in scenes that featured outward homosexuality, but even Pacino’s alleged resistance to performing in such scenes serves to make his characterization all the stronger. His interactions with his lover are confined to telephone conversations, which seem to offer Pacino the particular measure of restraint he tends to need as a performer in order to truly act well. His impulse seems to be to act in an explosive and physical manner, but in the hands of a legendary director, and with material that forces him to hold back or be emotionally or physically cut off from his co-stars; Pacino is able to use his facial expressions and delicate turns of voice to convey an incredible range of emotion. In his best performances, this restraint leads up to a sudden explosion of emotion (such as his attack on Diane Keaton in The Godfather II) or, in the case of Dog Day Afternoon, his now famous “Attica! Attica!” calls for revolution and resistance. This is the sort of performance that not only engages and excites, but also serves to inspire and touch. 
James R. Fleming
“There used to be a me,” Sellers once famously told Kermit the Frog, “but I had it surgically removed”. For as much as Sellers’ idea of himself as a virtual non-entity, only taking shape when he’s “on”, now feels inextricably tangled with the knowledge of his notorious off-screen abuses, it lends an overcast of melancholy and more than a couple layers of meta-meaning to his penultimate performance in Ashby’s already slippery Being There. As the intellectually stunted man-child Chance (quickly renamed Chauncey Gardener in the first of many misinterpretations) dispenses trite observations about flowers and television only to have them taken as metaphorical gospel by the rich and powerful, Sellers’ performance is one of pleasant smiles and vacant stares that rely on him never appearing to be in on the joke. But is there really a joke here at all?
For as much as the film functions as both media satire (Chance’s unwitting platitudes are ideally suited to a culture that has reduced politics to easy sound-bytes) and spiritual allegory (see the film’s famous closing shot), its real significance to the Sellers oeuvre lies in its revelation that the face behind the comic mask is not sad, but rather completely blank. “I like to watch TV”, Chance declares at more than one point, and Being There is, at heart, a film about how the constant flickering distraction that surrounds us has left us unable to separate the ridiculous from the sublime, fools from saviors, mediocrity from genius. Jer Fairall
On a car trip across Sweden, Isak Borg is on a journey to receive an award honoring his storied career. Through a series of daydreams and nightmares, he relives some of his most painful memories: the ones that he’s brushed over, and the ones that he’s chosen to remember with fondness instead of malice. He is forced to see them again as they were, to give them dates. Throughout the film, Sjöström’s face tells almost the entirety of the story. How he wakes from his dreams, startled and struggling to even know where he’s at, how he collects himself up against harsh critiques, how he holds it all in and is able to work it all out so that he can just get on with his day. At times, Sjöström slumps his shoulders, or makes his face light up like a little boy’s, almost as if he were pleading for the intimacies of life to come easier, to move along with some grace instead of always with such friction and trauma.
“If I have been worried or sad during the day, it often calms me to recall childhood memories,” we hear Sjöström say in a voice-over as Isak drifts off for the final time in the film. It’s his only happy dream—watching his parents fish together on the shore and, without words, the camera pulls in tight on Sjöström’s face, in front of a bright Swedish sky. Back in his bed, he almost smiles. In our life we may never get to say it all, or be able to express to our truly loved ones how they save our lives every day, but the look on Sjöström’s face as he rolls over on his pillows seems to say that in small moments, wordlessly, maybe in some unanticipated way, we can. And that these moments, whenever they come, are worth holding on for. Jon Langmead
He was known as “the man you love to hate”—and that was just among the studio chiefs he worked with throughout his two decades (1919-1933) as a director. But there was much more to the Austrian immigrant turned auteur than elaborate back stories (most of which were fake) and legendary battles with producers. Von Stroheim was also an amazing actor, as his work alongside the great Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay in Jean Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece confirmed. Playing Captain von Rauffenstein, a German officer destined to guide the fate of two fallen French aviators during World War I, von Stroheim easily essayed both parts of the anti-war dynamic—hero and villain, pawn and player. His turn was so powerful that it, along with the entire film, it was labeled “Cinematic Public Enemy #1” by none other than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. When you can piss off the Third Reich, you must be doing something right, and this film (and Von Stroheim) definitely managed such meaningful discourse. Bill Gibron
