This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.
LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role. Given his reputation for stressing the importance of emotional groping in acting, one might be surprised at how technically accomplished his work is, especially in the scene where he talks about the grounds he has for harboring a grudge against Michael, begins to make a painful-sounding noise indicating that he's having trouble controlling his breathing, and just plows on ahead with his monologue, mastefully using the painful-sounding grunts as counterpoint to the lines. Strasberg won an Academy Award nomination for the performance but lost to another of his old students, Robert De Niro, for De Niro's performance in the same movie. It's no surprise that after this late-life fling, he was eager to do more film acting, though it's also no surprise that, at his age, there seemed to be no surplus of appropriate roles halfway worthy of him. He played Pacino's grandfather in the 1979 ...And Justice for All and co-starred with Ruth Gordon in Boardwalk and with Art Carney and George Burns in Going in Style that same year, and died in 1982.
DOMINIC CHIANESE: Chianese, who played Hyman Roth's right-hand man Johnny Ola, is unique in the annals of Godfather cast members in that he didn't really get much of a career boost from the movie but later became a celebrity thanks to his work in another organized-crime drama made twenty-five years later, which often used The Godfather itself as a handy reference point: The Sopranos. Chianese began his show business career as a musician with one foot in musical theater-- Gilbert and Sullivan, off-Broadway musicals, Oliver! He was working for the man, giving guitar lessons in a rehab center, when he landed the role of Johnny Ola and performed it with a skillfully applied veneer of polished smarm. (It was his second movie role, after a bit part in the 1972 Fuzz.) It did lead to fairly steady work in film and TV and a continuing association with Al Pacino: a year after The Godfather, Part II, he played Pacino's father in Dog Day Afternoon, and twenty years after that, Pacino invited him to participate in his documentary about acting Shakespeare, Looking for Richard. But none of that brought him anywhere near the attention he earned when David Chase stuck a pair of Mr. Magoo eyeglasses on him and dubbed him Uncle Junior. Since then, he has appeared in such movies as Unfaithful (2002) and When Will I Be Loved (2004) but has mostly used the boost he got from the TV show to re-energize his singing career, making personal appearances and releasing the CDs Hits and Ungrateful Heart.
ABE VIGODA: Vigoda was hired at an open casting call to play Tessio, the dignified and, to his ultimate misfortune, the tragically "smarter" of the Don's two oldest and most trusted close associates. At the time, he had done some stage work and a little TV, but had gained an embarrassingly slight toehold in the business for a working actor who'd recently entered his fifties. The shot of him at the Don's daughter's wedding, smiling while dancing with a little girl who's standing on his shoes, is as endearingly human as any image in the film; the later shot of him, lit like Boris Karloff at a black masque and laughing at the idea of the upstanding Michael carrying out an assassination, is scary enough to make you lose it in your pants. The movie automatically raised Vigoda's profile among casting directors. (Vigoda would tell interviewers that it also raised his profile among traffic cops, who took to stopping the shifty, baleful-looking man who they knew they'd seen someplace before...) Vigoda's big post-Godfather break was, of course, that of Fish, the senior citizen member of the detective squad on the TV comedy Barney Miller. That role made him semi-beloved, but after a couple of years, the network insisted on spinning him off onto his own goddamn sitcom with a bunch of goddamn kids, and after that was quickly canceled, Vigoda was stranded, overexposed, and badly typecast.
But he didn't turn into an official joke until the premature reports of his death started in 1982, with a false item in People magazine. It might have helped if Vigoda hadn't seemed so grateful for the attention. By now, late night talk shows, Conan O'Brien's in particular, have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating Vigoda as a punch line, the way comedians of an earlier generation used Sonny Tufts or The Horn Blows at Midnight. Sometimes the joke is that Vigoda, who turned 87 this year, is still alive; that may be an inevitable result of his having had his greatest success playing walking dead men before he himself was sixty. Sometimes, the joke seems to just be that there's this fellow named Abe Vigoda out there who was once in a great movie and whose name is still recognizable. It doesn't help that in Vigoda's few appearances in movies that have actually been released to theaters since 1974--such deathless classics as Joe Versus the Volcano and North--he seems to have been cast on the theory that it'll just tickle people to see Abe Vigoda turn up in a movie, as if he were an actor or something. Perhaps sensing this, Vigoda has generally seemed less alive and committed in these roles than he does when Conan or Dave has trotted him out to use as a sight gag. It's not altogether clear just what he's done to deserve this, but sometimes the world is just brutal on people who insist on continuing to exist after we've decided that that their fifteen minutes are up.