The 50th KVIFF will be remembering the masterful work of two actors and outstanding figures of American cinema who died before their time, and who would otherwise have celebrated significant jubilees of their own this year.
One of the most admired stage and film actors of the 1970s, John Cazale (1935 - 1978) appeared in only five films. All of them were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and 3 of them won it. It is impossible to forget the disregarded weakling Fredo Corleone in the first two parts of Coppola’s saga The Godfather. The same director cast him in the cult-classic psychological thriller The Conversation. Cazale was particularly admired by his colleagues, like Al Pacino, with whom he worked also on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. Seriously ill, John Cazale gave a final flourish to his life’s work in Cimino’s celebrated drama The Deer Hunter.
Also in the career of Chris Penn (1965 - 2006), the youngest of the renowned family of actors, it was Francis Ford Coppola who played a key role, giving the aspiring actor a role in his film Rumble Fish (1983). With a winsome sense of coarse humour and an explosive expressiveness, Penn could hardly go amiss in the world of Quentin Tarantino films (Reservoir Dogs or True Romance, for which Tarantino wrote the screenplay). The Venice Film Festival awarded Penn on two occasions – once as a part of the ensemble cast of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), and three years later for Abel Ferrara’s unconventional gangster film The Funeral.
