THE GODFATHER GOES SOLO

By RICHARD CORLISS

In Hollywood's Golden Age--around the time Al Pacino was born, and Eugene O'Neill was writing his short play Hughie--nearly all movie actors came from the stage. They had voices then, and a glamour that could penetrate both the footlights and the kleig lights. Yet few stars of the '30s and '40s returned to the theater when they and it were in their prime.

So go figure: today, when elocution is a nearly lost art and Broadway has faded into the Great White Where?, lots of big-time stars are doing theater. Serious stuff, like Shakespeare and Beckett. Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves have all paid obeisance to the old muse. Like doing an arty low-budget film, a stab at the classics can be a rite of purification after all those grimy blockbusters.

Pacino is almost a commuter between Hollywood and Broadway; he's played in Richard III, Mamet's American Buffalo and Wilde's Salome. Now, in a revival of the 1941 Hughie, he tackles O'Neill. Or better, wrestles with him--for this 55-min. one-acter, which Pacino also directed, is virtually a one-man show. A conversation a lonely man has with himself, it requires that the actor bring theatrical variety to monologue monotony.

Set in a seedy Manhattan hotel lobby in 1928, Hughie is an old-fashioned tale--even the clock on the wall ticks in waltz tempo. And Erie Smith (Pacino) is an old-fashioned gambler, a loser out of Damon Runyon. For Erie, horseplaying is a sacred vocation. "I'd rather sleep in the same stall with old Man o' War," he says, "than make the whole damn Follies." Down on his luck, he has the sour, insistent patter of a guy without dolls, a sharpie gone flat. Tonight he's got nothing better to do than talk to a taciturn desk clerk (the excellent Paul Benedict). The clerk hardly listens, but that doesn't matter. Erie could be speaking to a barkeep or a stranger on a bus, or to a mute God on a slow night in limbo. He's a nonstop mouth in search of an open ear.

And who is Hughie? A fellow who used to work the desk, someone who took interest in Erie's mutterings, or seemed to. Hughie is dead now, so Erie elegizes a man he thought brought him luck. Like most elegies, this one is about the mourner. Erie needs a new lucky charm. If he can connect with this clerk--turn their parallel monologues into a dialogue--the gambler might be a winner again.

On screen lately, in Heat and City Hall, Pacino has grown more manic and mannerist. The finger snapping, the zany intensity of his stare and the sudden, ferocious barks are weirdly suggestive of the older, crabby, haunted Jerry Lewis. As Pacino soars into camp, one wonders: Is he a failed great actor or a great bad one? But onstage, he relaxes a bit. He knows the spectators are creating their own close-ups, so he plays piano: softer and with nuance. He gets to the tiredness of Erie and to the semisweet-chocolate heart of this frail playlet, and transforms O'Neill's monologue into a ripe conversation with the audience. So again, go figure: Al Pacino, film star, was made for the stage.

--By Richard Corliss