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That Guy! Classic: Joe Spinell

Posted by Peter Smith
It’s easy to pick legendary character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age to profile in this feature; much harder is selecting actors who died too young and who, by all rights, should still be with us, making movies. Joe Spinell is one of those. Born Joseph Spagnuolo in 1936, the burly Manhattanite changed his name to make things easy on the casting directors who called him all too infrequently, making him reliant on low-paying night jobs like driving a taxi or working the counter at a seedy liquor store. There was nothing calculated or contrived about his Spinell’s frequent portrayals of tough-guy New Yorkers; he grew up hard and worked for a decade with the Theater of the Forgotten, a troupe that performed exclusively for prison inmates. Spinell’s first big break came in 1972, when he was cast (based almost exclusively on his thuggish looks and his inimitable accent) in a very minor role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Coppola liked him so much that he specifically expanded the role of Willie Cicci to give Spinell more screen time in the sequel. A few years later, Spinell landed one of his most memorable roles, playing opposite his good friend Sylvester Stallone in Rocky as Tony Gazzo, the two-bit loan shark who employs Rocky Balboa as a legbreaker. Never a big star, even by the diminished standards of character actors, Spinell was a working actor his entire life, constantly struggling to support a large family by taking whatever roles came his way; while the gems in his catalog are broken up by a great deal of dross, when he was on screen in a good role, it was easy to see why talented directors like Coppola and Martin Scorsese took to him. He had a lazy, insouciant delivery that could turn on a dime into violent intensity, and he had a particular way of making even the simplest lines entirely his own. Towards the end of his career, Spinell was financing horror movies (exemplified by the grotesque but successful Maniac) that he wrote and directed himself, and had the dubious honor of being John Wayne Gacy’s personal choice to play the serial killer in a movie. Unfortunately, we’d never have the opportunity to see how he’d do in the role, or where else his career might take him: Joe Spinell died in 1989 of a heart attack, not yet fifty-two years old.

Where to see Joe Spinell at his best:

THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The minor character of Willie Cicci, Frankie Pentangeli’s bodyguard, was never meant as anything more than a bit part. But Francis Ford Coppola liked Joe Spinell enough to expand the role into a Joe Valachi-type character in the sequel to The Godfather, and Spinell paid him back by turning in a fantastic, scene-stealing performance. Cicci brings down the house at a Senate committee investigation into organized crime, explaining to the movie’s fuddled stand-in for Estes Kefauver that the Corleone family "had a lot of buttons."

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t the only Italian-American director from New York who took a shine to the louche, dangerous Spinell. Martin Scorsese also found his demeanor and delivery worth showcasing, and gave him a small but key role in his 1976 masterpiece of New York as a lower circle of Hell. Here, Spinell plays the dispatcher who makes the mistake of giving Travis Bickle a job driving a hack; suspecting (not unjustly) that Bickle has a bit of an attitude problem, he unfortunately gives him the job anyway. Probably because he’ll work Jewish holidays.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Joe Spinell didn’t often have the chance to show off any comedic chops, but when it did, it could be devastatingly effective. In William Peter Blatty’s remarkable film about a military psychiatrist assigned to rehabilitate officers suspected of faking insanity, he plays the cleverly named Lt. Spinell, casting director to Jason Miller’s Lt. Reno, who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs. In one of the movie’s most memorable, and hilarious, scenes, Spinell offers deadpan, and devastating, opinions on Reno’s casting choices.

— Leonard Pierce


+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Nov 07 2007, 04:00 PM
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Comments

Dianna Trent said:

Always liked this guy and I KNEW his real name wasn't 'Spinell'! Anyway, did you know he really DID have asthma and when he had to pull out his 'breather' in ROCKY, that wasn't even in the script? He did it anyway and nobody edited it out. They didn't have to. Joe made it part of Gazzo's character! He proved himself in Stallone's other film, PARADISE ALLEY, too! Owner of the bar with the same name, he 'clowned' it up good!

WE'LL MISS YA, JOE!!

November 9, 2007 12:27 PM

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