10 Times An Actor Went On An Insane Streak Of Great Movies

3. Al Pacino, 1972-1975

The Streak: The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon. So exhausted was Al Pacino after the last film in this streak, Dog Day Afternoon, that he took a hiatus from performing, not to be seen again until two years later in Sydney Pollack's misjudged Bobby Deerfield. His break was well earned; for the previous three years he'd been turning in iconic, emotionally exhausting performances in four of the finest films of the 70s (or any decade for that matter). His performances as the two sides of Michael Corleone - the passive, reluctant gangster of Part I and the manipulative, evil incarnation of Part II - make for one of the most complete roles in cinema history, whereas his turn as real-life counterculture cop, Frank Serpico, showed that the actor can play the flip of that, too, delivering a fine, fraught performance in a film he opted to star in just when studios where trying to convince him to become a heartthrob. Best of all, however, is his performance as Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, on the one hand a bumbling, Woody Allen-esque klutz, on the other a politically charged revolutionary of sorts. It's a career best from Pacino, his improvised screaming of "Attica! Attica" (a reference to the Attica Prison riot of '71) the highlight of a role that the actor turned into an embodiment of America's nervous energy post-Vietnam and post-Watergate.