‘Sonny Boy’ Review: A Star Early and Late

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Al Pacino was so displeased with one film that he gave his earnings to charity. Another project led him to walk away from movies for years.

Farran Smith Nehme

Oct. 17, 2024 5:15 pm ET

“I don’t think you ever lose your energy,” Al Pacino remarks toward the end of his memoir, “Sonny Boy.” “You just lose your looks.”

These days Mr. Pacino, now 84 years old, may feel a bit wistful recalling his handsome reflection in 1972. That was when his epic turn as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” made the actor a star, if not overnight, he says, then within a week of its release. Even so, on a turn around his Beverly Hills neighborhood, Mr. Pacino can get only about “ten steps on my walk before I am noticed.” Unruly white hair, a baseball cap, big overcoat—it doesn’t matter, he is still unmistakably Al Pacino, a movie superstar of rare stature.

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Sonny Boy: A Memoir

By Al Pacino

Penguin Press

384 pages

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And in “Sonny Boy,” Mr. Pacino still sounds like the actor who dazzled in his heyday. The book, written with Dave Itzkoff, preserves Mr. Pacino’s personality, with all his intelligence, his wit and his eagerness to talk about the theater history he loves. Born in East Harlem in 1940, Mr. Pacino could channel the city’s mean streets through experience alone. His parents divorced, and his mother moved with him to the South Bronx, where young Alfredo was nicknamed “Sonny” and grew up playing in garbage-strewn lots with friends. But the boy’s future was evident as early as age 5, when his mother took him to Billy Wilder’s harrowing “The Lost Weekend” and afterward Sonny entertained his adult relatives by re-enacting Ray Milland’s desperate search for a hidden bottle of booze.

At times it seems like a miracle that Mr. Pacino found his way to Hollywood. He dropped out of the High School of Performing Arts at 16, worked odd jobs, and slept on friends’ floors or the occasional stage between acting classes. But he sees his achievements as inevitable; his artistic vocation was bone-deep. When less successful actors asked him why he made it, Mr. Pacino says he would tell them, “You wanted to. I had to.”

Mr. Pacino takes us along for his climb, through flunking an audition for the Actors Studio (he’s now co-president) and outraging HB Studio’s founder with a too-real scene as a hoodlum, to making his mark on New York’s Off- and Off-Off Broadway scene. He broke into film with “The Panic in Needle Park” in 1971. Cast in “The Godfather,” he was nearly fired, he says, because Paramount executives didn’t get his subtle approach to the early scenes. He was saved only by director Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to jump ahead to film a later scene where Michael shoots the men who tried to kill his father; Mr. Pacino’s brilliance persuaded the studio to let him stay.

A golden age followed: He played the title role in the police corruption tale “Serpico” (1973) as well as Michael Corleone again in “The Godfather Part II” (1974) and an ill-fated bank robber in 1975’s “Dog Day Afternoon.” (Mr. Pacino credits the assistant director with suggesting he ad-lib the “Attica” chant, riling the crowd with the memory of the recent prison uprising.) Even the excellent “Scarecrow”—a box-office dud in 1973—was redeemed by great reviews.

Then he made the auto-racing film “Bobby Deerfield” (1977), an attempt, Mr. Pacino says, to deal with the depression he was feeling after treating his addiction to alcohol. “It is just not a great film,” he admits. Mr. Pacino was so displeased with “Cruising” (1980) that he put his earnings into a trust for charity. Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” from 1983 has become a landmark, despite its initially poor reception, and Mr. Pacino proudly calls it “a blatant indictment of the 1980s” (he adds that the residuals still help support him). But the disastrous 1985 costume epic “Revolution” helped drop Mr. Pacino into a career trough so persistent that he walked away from movies for four years.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pacino moved through relationships with a list of famous women: Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller, Kathleen Quinlan, Diane Keaton. Mr. Pacino has mastered the art of seeming candid without revealing much of anything. The women in his life are praised for their beauty and talent, then slip away for reasons usually left unstated, though the writer tends to imply that the breakups were his fault. Beverly D’Angelo is suddenly cited as the mother of Mr. Pacino’s twins Olivia and Anton in a passage explaining why Mr. Pacino moved to Los Angeles; two paragraphs later, he and Ms. D’Angelo are working out visitation rights. If you like your star memoirs with a side of dish, “Sonny Boy” may disappoint.

We do hear the story of the crooked accountant who depleted Mr. Pacino’s assets, which explains certain paycheck films on his résumé that the actor says “will go unmentioned.” Once Mr. Pacino went back to film acting, winning an Oscar for 1992’s “Scent of a Woman,” he began doing some of the best work of his career, but “Sonny Boy” doesn’t offer much detail about this period. “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992) gets a few paragraphs, while the splendid run of “Carlito’s Way” (1993), “Heat” (1995) and “Donnie Brasco” (1997) is sent off with about four pages. Mr. Pacino’s phenomenal work as Jimmy Hoffa in “The Irishman” (2019), for this critic’s money a top-five career performance, is reduced to little more than a pleasant anecdote about taking his kids to the Oscars.

Still, one can say Mr. Pacino has earned the right to give more space to what he wants to discuss. He spends time on the Shakespeare documentary “Looking for Richard,” which he directed in 1996 and calls his happiest experience. And he offers trenchant observations on why “The Godfather Part III” (1990) was made (“I was broke. Francis was broke”). The book ends with his declaration that he’s still as driven as ever—that his “clock is still ticking. I still have the need to do this.”

Ms. Nehme writes for Sight & Sound, the Criterion Collection and elsewhere.

Appeared in the October 18, 2024, print edition as 'A Star Early And Late'.