At my age, I should be grumpier, but, even though I tell my kids to shut down their screens and play outside with friends, I love the ease with which I find out cool things while sunk in my own screens for hours on end. Do as I say (not as I do)! Today, I was reading about Fredo, Michael Corleone's slow brother in The Godfather and, more prominently, The Godfather Part II. Of course it was Chris Cuomo's viral takedown of some fellow bar patron who called him "Fredo" that steered me along to this New Yorker article, the point of which, as a Godfather enthusiast, I endorse. But how is it that I could have known so little about John Cazale, the actor who plays Fredo in these great movies?
For example, this sentence from the article: "[Cazale] died, from cancer, in 1978, at the age of forty-two, with his girlfriend, Meryl Streep, at his bedside." On the lighter side, the "forty-two" makes me wonder why The New Yorker's house style doesn't also require "in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and seventy eight." And what are the odds that, before the editing process, author Michael Schulman's version of this sentence had fewer commas? Anyway, I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, that Cazale had died so young and that Meryl Streep was his girlfriend. I looked it up and she would have been 28 when he died. She married her husband, the sculptor Don Gummer, later in 1978, an eventful year in her personal life.
Here's another factoid: Cazale only acted in five films, and every one of them—The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter—was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. (The Deer Hunter and the two Godfather films all won.) Cazale himself was never nominated. Since I think his performance in the second Godfather picture is sublime, I looked up the nominees for that year (1975). In the best supporting actor category, three of the nominees were from Godfather II—Michael Gazzo, Lee Strasberg, and the winner, Robert DeNiro. Can't really nitpick that overmuch but, honestly, I think Cazale's performance was on the same level. In Dog Day Afternoon, his character, bank robber Sal Naturale, is similarly vulnerable, sad, and poignantly witless. When asked by his accomplice, played by Al Pacino, what country he'd like to escape to, Cazale's Sal replies, in a whisper, "Wyoming." According to Schulman, this wasn't in the script: it was a perfect ad lib.
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