The Godsons

Saturday-night muggings in Times Square are as routine as the traffic, but one recent stickup had a certain piquancy. Two gunmen knocked over a movie theater, shot the manager in the arm and made off with $13,000. The theater happened to be showing The Godfather. A mad publicity stunt? Retribution by the Mafia? More likely it was ironic coincidence--and ill-planned as well. At the rate The Godfather is packing them in, the $13,000 loot would just about account for the weekend popcorn sales.

In its first week of simultaneous release at five theaters in New York City, The Godfather pulled down close to half a million dollars. The lines at box offices are so long that some Broadway sharpies sell their places up front for $20 a shot. After openings in 34 other U.S. cities last week, Paramount expects to have $14 million stashed in the corporate kitty by the middle of next month. Says Paramount President Frank Yablans: "The picture is nothing less than an annuity."

A movie with such mass appeal is not only going to make headlines and money. It is going to make stars. The Godfather is blessed with brilliant acting. Marlon Brando, of course, is the big news, revitalizing his erratic reputation with a performance of power and poignance as the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone. Yet superb as he is, Brando is merely reclaiming a position already staked out. In some ways more exciting are the clutch of little-known younger performers who burst forth in the film. Of these, none is more compelling than a short, brooding coil of tension named Al Pacino.

Pacino plays Michael, the Godfather's favorite son and eventual heir. It may well be the most difficult role of the film. Michael begins as a war hero and college boy who insists on retaining an identity separate from the Corleone "business." He ends as a remorseless Don who conducts family affairs with brutal efficiency. This development is only implicit in the script, never stated outright. Pacino carries it off with exceptional intelligence and energy. The triumph of his performance is that it conveys Michael's youthful sensitivity without ever losing an edge of animal menace. To tap the right mixture of emotions, Pacino says he "thought a lot about music while I was doing the part --and of an image. I saw Michael as though there was a circle of light and heat around him, shining on his face, that he was always trying to get out of. Michael is so very alone. That's the thing I found it difficult to live with. Next I want to do a comedy. Then I could have some fun every day."

Survival Test. Although Pacino was a long shot who had to overcome both Paramount's skepticism and some big-name competition to win his role (TIME, March 13), no member of the cast has a more appropriate background for the movie. Of mostly Sicilian descent, he was raised in the South Bronx, a place that is less a neighborhood than a survival test. He was a solitary boy who used to hide out for hours atop an advertising billboard and who lived in fantasies spawned by the movies his mother took him to see. (His father, a mason, had left home when Al was two.) He entertained the other neighborhood kids by spinning stories. "I would tell them I was from Texas," he recalls.

Pacino threw himself into school plays with such fervor that his teachers urged that he be sent to the High School of Performing Arts. There, despite his acting talent, his grades were lackluster. After leaving school at 17, he began what he calls "the lost years, moving from job to job, furnished room to furnished room, always broke." He had started drinking at 13. Now he was drinking more. He lost a job as a movie usher after he prankishly led a line of ticket holders across the street to stand aimlessly in front of a department store. Finally, as superintendent of an apartment building, he "hustled garbage cans" and lived in a basement room. Taped to his door with Band-Aids was an 8-by-10 glossy of himself. Underneath was written "super." Says Pacino, "That was down about as far as anyone can get."

During this time he walked fitfully all over Manhattan, reciting scenes from plays to himself, slipping off into side alleys to read O'Neill aloud to the brick walls. In 1966 he auditioned for the Actors Studio and was accepted. "I got back into acting to save my life," is the way he puts it now. He started landing small parts, which led to an Obie Award-winning performance in off-Broadway's The Indian Wants the Bronx in 1968 and, the following year, to a Tony Award for Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? on Broadway.

In his performances he seemed repeatedly to be taking refuge in what he felt safest doing--a manic, tortured intensity. His first major movie role, as a junkie in last year's The Panic in Needle Park, was an impressive debut that seemed, nevertheless, predictable to those who had seen his theater work. The Godfather changed all that.

While Pacino's character is the most important of the Godfather's four sons, he remains part of a balanced quartet. In the roles of the other sons--all crucial in varying ways--the movie brings three more actors into the front rank:

JAMES CAAN plays the terrible-tempered eldest brother Sonny in a performance of great force, the perfect foil to Pacino's calculating and withdrawn Michael. Sonny is a character who falls victim to his own passion. The actor playing him could have met the same fate. Caan, however, knows how to make a character broad and boisterous without being overemphatic.

Previously best known for his performance as the retarded ex-football player in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, Caan offstage is an exuberant put-on artist and stand-up comedian. He also has a bit of Sonny in him. "I was the toughest guy at P.S. 106 back in New York," he likes to boast. "I was expelled from a private school for throwing some kid out a window. He wasn't really hurt. It was only a 1 1/2story fall, and he landed in a flower garden."

Caan himself fell into acting after a couple of aimless years at college, where he played football and dabbled in business administration. He spent a year at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse but stoutly refused to take certain courses. "I wasn't going to any ballet classes where the guys were looking in the mirror all day doing their exercises," he says. He made his way to Hollywood, where "they were always sending me rotten scripts," he recalls. "I'd write 'Screw off' on them and send them back." When the studio insisted on his participation in Journey to Shiloh, Caan donned a fright wig and mumbled his dialogue so badly that each line had to be dubbed. "That," he recalls with satisfaction, "was my last picture for Universal."

Caan, 33, studied for his Godfather role not so much by reading the script as by hanging around Brooklyn with "a lot of guys who aren't exactly bakers." Caan is one of the few non-Italians in the film, and his assimilation seems virtually flawless. He even added some business of his own. Sonny's contemptuous gestufe of throwing money on the ground after he has shattered a photographer's camera, for instance, is a Caan invention.

ROBERT DUVALL, who plays the Godfather's adopted son Tom Hagen, has a face that is never familiar. Engrave it on a newly minted nickel and he still would not be recognized on the street. This enduring anonymity may be a handicap to celebrity, but it gives him a chameleon's adaptability. Over the past decade, Duvall, 41, has appeared in at least a dozen movies, applying an unemphatic virtuosity to every kind of role from cab drivers to union organizers, milksops to archvil-lains (remember John Wayne's nemesis in True Grit?).

Hagen, the Godfather's consigliere, is a combination lawyer, valet and advance man--"a million-dollar go-fer," in Duvall's words. The role as written is a sketch, a brief for a character. Duvall painted in the portrait. For instance, he wanted to suggest that Hagen, despite all his college education, still retained strong traces of his street origins. He remembered two Italian cronies of his who had once come to watch him rehearse in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge. "They sat there," Duvall recalls, "watching Miller, listening to him talk. After the rehearsal they told me Miller reminded them of a guy who had made it in the rackets. That quality was what I worked for in Hagen."

JOHN CAZALE plays Fredo in a role no more than half as large as the other Corleone brothers, yet he is just as memorable. Fredo is shy, tentative and a lit tle dim. During the violent exercises of power he remains outside the action, full of precarious bravado that shatters at the first threat. By accentuating Fredo's all-too-human vulnerability, Cazale steals neatly off with The Godfather's funniest moment (Fredo struggling to be a Las Vegas stud) and its most poignant (Fredo sitting on a curb next to his father's bullet-riddled body, wailing helplessly).

Cazale, 36, has scuffled along from acting classes at Boston University to the Charles Playhouse to the inevitable stint off-Broadway, where he paid the rent between acting jobs by becoming a photographer. He was also an office messenger at the Esso Building in Rockefeller Center. There one of his fellow messengers was a struggling actor named Al Pacino.

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