Halfway through his new memoir, Al Pacino recalls a crisis that unfolded on the set of The Godfather while filming in Sicily. Pacino was shooting a wedding scene with the actor Simonetta Stefanelli, and at one point director Francis Ford Coppola asked him to speak to the local people who were forming part of the background. But none of these extras understood English, and Pacino, despite growing up in an Italian household in New York, didn’t quite speak the language of his grandparents. Later, Coppola asked the bride and the groom to dance a waltz together, but Pacino again pleaded incompetence. Towards the end of the scene, the couple were supposed to drive away in a car, but Pacino, ever the New Yorker, didn’t know how to drive. It was at this moment that Coppola ran out of patience with his male lead. “Why did I ever hire you?” he shouted at Pacino. “What can you do?”
In many ways, Coppola’s question propels Pacino all through Sonny Boy. How did a delinquent school dropout from the South Bronx end up as arguably the most persuasive actor to ever grace a movie screen? Antiheroes have rarely seemed as manic as the chainsaw-defying Tony Montana in Scarface, or looked as vulnerable wielding a rifle as the bank robber Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, or just voiced as many cool lines as the reluctant mafia boss Michael Corleone in the Godfather trilogy: “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.” And: “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.”
