Continuing my streak of breaking thirty year-old, well-reported news, I wrote some things about Cruising for Bullett. That would be Cruising, the 1980 William Friedkin/Al Pacino masterpiece about a leather bar serial killer, which is on Watch Now for the next five days, so really if you're gonna watch it, watch it now. Now now now!
Last week, previews started for the new Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, which has been marketed with a particularly unimaginative bit of stunt casting: putting Al Pacino, who played hotshot Ricky Roma in the 1992 film adaptation, in the role of sadsack Shelly Levene. Because we haven’t seen this new Glengarry yet, and because it’s a grey Friday afternoon, we decided to spend the afternoon with an earlier, less self-conscious version of Alfredo James Pacino. It was a worthwhile experiment, and not just because it was so much more fun than doing real work.
(An aside: Can you measure an actor’s success by how few original plays he appears in on Broadway? Pacino’s last appearance in an original play was in 1969′s Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie?, a drug addict drama the Times called “spasmodically rewarding.” It closed in a month, but Pacino drew good reviews for his portrayal of “a lumbering, drug-sodden psychopath with the mind of a bully and the soul of a poet.” He got famous soon after, and since then has been the kind of bankable Hollywood star who can anchor a big money revival.)
And, of course, there's more! But this is really the best part—the jockstrap-wearing cop whose presence is not explained at all: