Ham of the PeopleHow Al Pacino got typecast as Al Pacino.

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Michael Corleone's seamless transformation from baby-faced college boy to hollow-eyed, brother-killing Don has been much celebrated, yet the first two Godfather films drew something from Pacino that's rarely been tapped since: a regal stillness that evokes far more pity and terror than all the mugging and ranting that would later become his stock in trade. Though Michael does become a bit of screamer by Part II, all of his most tectonic scenes are quiet: when he announces his intentions to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey; when he plants the kiss of death on Fredo; when he wordlessly shuts the door on Kay, sealing her cruel exile from her children.

The first Godfather launched a magnificent run for Pacino: He was the puppyish wayfarer opposite Hackman in Schatzberg's Scarecrow (1973), the heroic cop in Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), and, in Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), he gave a stunningly complex performance as Sonny Wortzik, the ruined romantic who attempts a hapless bank robbery to secure funds for his lover's sex change. The movie afforded a rare chance for Pacino to show his gifts as a physical comedian (just watch Sonny wrestle his rifle out of the box as the robbery commences). Dog Day Afternoon also proved that, more than any of his contemporaries, Pacino was willing to poke holes in the leading man's armor of hetero-machismo, as he had in Scarecrow and The Local Stigmatic and would again as a New York cop investigating the gay S&M club scene in William Friedkin's Cruising. (Maligned by critics and gay activists alike upon its first appearance in 1980, Cruising gets a select theatrical re-release on Sept. 7 and reaches DVD on Sept. 18.)

As was the case with many of his fellow '70s icons, Pacino saw his fortunes flag in the '80s, notwithstanding his turn as the eyebrow-flexing, cigar-wagging, chainsaw-defying psychopath known as Tony Montana. Pacino has indicated that Scarface is the film he's most identified with, and the number of kids in my Brooklyn neighborhood who sport knee-grazing Tony Montana T-shirts would seem to bear this out. While Pacino has wicked fun with screenwriter Oliver Stone's priapic bons mots ("This town is like a great big pussy, just waiting to get focked"), the cult of Montana set an unfortunate precedent. Pacino increasingly sought out big, shouty parts and then inflated them past their already outsized proportions: He out-Sataned Satan in The Devil's Advocate (1997), spontaneously combusted at regular intervals in Two for the Money (2005), and imitated a disgruntled spaniel in this year's Ocean's Thirteen.

The victory of shtick over craft is disheartening. It's important to remember, though, that the man is a populist, whether he's communing with admirers outside the stage door or directing Looking for Richard, a film obsessed with making Shakespeare accessible to a mass audience. In Babbleonia, Pacino recounts seeing a performance of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a life-changing experience: "The audience became the theater; they were the event, they were the play." This observation may be instructive: If, for Pacino, the audience is the thing, and the audience wants Cartoon Al, then Cartoon Al they shall have. (Oscar voters certainly did.)

And sometimes, big is best. Pacino is terrific in his films with Michael Mann, as the brilliant, voluble cop in Heat (1995) and the brilliant, voluble TV producer in The Insider (1999). A recent career highlight was prime-cut ham all the way. In Mike Nichols' HBO adaptation of Angels in America (2003), right-wing attack dog Roy Cohn at last presented a character manic and outlandish and wildly contradictory enough to swallow up Al Pacino. But in the film's most riveting scene, Cohn—in the last throes of AIDS and swooning with opiates—is mostly silent as his nurse (Jeffrey Wright) delivers a purring rebuke of the disgraced villain's entire life: a vision of heaven where Cohn is nowhere to be found. It's a stroke of genius to ask Al Pacino, of all people, to listen, to react, to efface himself. If only it could strike more often.

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