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Megastars together on screen

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill
  • Posted at 3:02pm
  • 31 October 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

For me, the heat of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino joining forces in cop thriller Righteous Kill was dampened when the film company sent out a flimsy plastic wallet with their image on it. This should be a major movie event, a double header to rival Newman and McQueen or Davis and Crawford, not commemorated by something designed to keep your bus pass in.

It turned out to be apt. The film, a formulaic police procedural, was panned by critics and shunned by audiences, with the much-anticipated sparks generated by two of the greatest screen actors of their generation failing to materialise.

We should have seen it coming. Simply persuading two huge names to share the screen for 90 minutes doesn't necessarily lead to dramatic, or commercial, gold.

The only other time De Niro and Pacino shared top billing – aside from The Godfather Part II, in which their scenes were separated by 40 years, was in Michael Mann's majestic Heat (Saturday 1 November, BBC2). Here, Pacino was the cop, De Niro the robber.

Only briefly did the twain actually meet – in a low-key diner scene – and it was better that way. Even then, if you see the widescreen film on TV in "pan and scan" format, our two big hitters are rarely in the same frame.

Perhaps the screen can only really cope with one superstar at a time. The gothic psychodrama What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? worked because the faded stars played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are locked in sadistic sibling rivalry, echoing the off-screen friction between the two grande dames of Hollywood.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman had an easy chemistry in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So did Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men (Sunday 2 November, Wednesday 5 November Sky Movies Modern Greats), but camaraderie is rare. One star usually has to defer to the other.

For The Towering Inferno, at a time when disaster movies attracted the biggest stars in Hollywood, Steve McQueen made sure he had exactly the same number of lines as co-star Paul Newman, and a spat over billing on the poster gave rise to the now-common graphic solution: name on the right higher than name on the left so that if you read it left to right or top to bottom, either star can seem to have top billing.

In the end, a heavyweight pairing makes more marketing than dramatic sense: "Together! On Screen! For The First Time! Somebody Really Famous And Somebody Else Really Famous!"

And they don't have to mention the formulaic cop movie.

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