The Man Who Starred in 5 Best Pictures and Nothing Else — John Cazale (Video Essay)
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Best picture nominees.
For people who don’t know about him, the title implies that he stopped acting or something. He died in 1978, which was the same year as The Deer Hunter, and the last movie he was in.
This is the kind of career that should be a benchmark for aspiring actors.
Arguably the best track record an actor has ever had.
Starred?
Just wanted to say, what a great video you’ve made, and a very worthy topic. These are among my favorite films and I had the thrill JUST last month of having a watch party at work of Godfather I & II and Dog Day with my coworkers, out of the 3 of them none had seen the latter and only one had seen the former – I couldn’t believe it!
But then of course even though they’re classics, they are about half a century old and there’s not necessarily anything putting this stuff in younger peoples’ faces. I was lucky my dad had me watching this stuff (arguably too young but it was awesome and now I’m awesome lol) in ELEMENTARY school haha. And then my friends were the kinds of kids who would hang out with the film teacher after school in high school, so there ya go.
People are always surprised by how freakin good older movies are, particularly movies from the 70s (my favorite era for film even though I was not alive). And it’s just an incomparable treat to get to share that with new people. It’s half the fun of dating lol.
Anyway, every last person was kinda dumbstruck by both Cazale and Pacino. If you’ve only mostly watched films from the past couple decades, think of what a surprise these performances are. Even Pacino, there’s a consensus he’s great, but I didn’t realize younger people kinda think it’s maybe overstated. We’d started with Godfather and they were just awestruck by his subtlety, gravity, transformation. Just utterly unique.
And you really touch on it with John, I never thought about that before this video – he’s so natural you completely forget there’s a performance and suddenly he’s in that chair at the end of II and you’re stricken for him.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing this, I’m gonna go find you on YT and subscribe.
If you gauge an actors merit simply by the quality of all of their movies then John Cazale is the greatest American actor.
He was in 8 films, 6 of which are huge films, and 2 of which are the terrible god father sequels.
When what almost everyone universally considers three of the greatest actors in history are threatening to walk off a picture for you, you KNOW you’re good.
This short video hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t even know he existed, and that’s perhaps the biggest tragedy of the whole thing.