Robert De Niro turns eighty this week—a milestone that apparently we find more aback-taking than he does; this past April, in his eightieth year, the legendary actor celebrated the birth of his seventh child. Nevertheless, as a first ballot Hall-of-Famer, prominent in the pantheon of the New Hollywood, and one of the great actors of the last half-century, it seems like a fitting moment for a proper Mid Century Cinema appreciation.
De Niro’s New Hollywood years began with notable roles two early, atypical and anarchic De Palma films, Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom!(1970); a smattering of initial performances included a small part in Ivan Passer’s impressive Born to Win (1971), and eventually a star turn in Bang the Drum Slowly. The ten years that followed would feature one of the most impressive acting runs in the history of American cinema. De Niro emerges as a force of nature in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), about which Pauline Kael had this to say: “De Niro does something like what Dustin Hoffman was doing in Midnight Cowboy, but wilder; this kid doesn’t just act—he takes off into the vapors. De Niro is so intensely appealing that it might be easy to overlook Harvey Keitel’s work as Charlie. But Keitel makes De Niro’s triumph possible.” Immediately on the heels of that star-making turn followed something completely different: an Academy Award winning performance in The Godfather II, for his portrayal of Vito Corleone in his youth. Vito, of course, was portrayed two years earlier (if much later in life), by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and DeNiro’s almost literally stepping into Brando’s shoes – he studied the earlier performance obsessively to get the character right – in retrospect represented a passing of the torch from one transcendent American actor to another.
The Godfather was followed by Taxi Driver (1976) which reunited De Niro with Martin Scorsese, and the film, and the performance (and, not to be underestimated, Paul Schrader’s screenplay) were landmarks of the New Hollywood movement, and established the level of intensity and immersion that De Niro set for his craft, and himself. Known for trying to “live the lives” of his characters (such as, for Taxi Driver, getting a hack license and working as a cabbie at night), at least as important was De Niro’s meticulous attention to detail; it was not uncommon (at least through Goodfellas) for his handwritten notes on screenplays to be much more extensive than the printed text itself, with each script page full of queries, suggestions, musings and ideas. In Taxi Driver, to take one small example among countless, he told Schrader (who quickly agreed) that Travis should in his diary write “would not” rather than “wouldn’t”.
In 1976 De Niro starred in two additional features, neither of which, to our eyes, soar to the heights of his previous three efforts, but each of which was unmistakably ambitious: Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic Novecento, and The Last Tycoon, directed by the legendary Elia Kazan. (Tycoon, from the unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and a Harold Pinter screenplay, and featuring an astonishing cast, somehow fails to come to life.) The following year welcomed the musical New York, New York, his third (of ten) collaborations with Martin Scorsese, and was quite a different thing from Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) which Roger Ebert described as “one of the most emotionally shattering movies ever made.” And speaking of emotionally shattering, it is hard to overpraise Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980), in which De Niro delivers, and, yes, this may sound repetitive, one of the great performances in the history of American cinema. True Confessions (Grosbard, 1981) and The King of Comedy (Scorsese, 1982) round out this astonishing ten film run; in the latter, De Niro once again embodies a character and a milieu entirely unlike all that had come before.
For the balance of the eighties, De Niro added to an impressive resume, with twelve disparate features from 1984 to 1990, films commonly ambitious and some monumental. From these we would single out Midnight Run (1988) opposite Charles Grodin, two outstanding performances in an action-comedy with something to say; Penny Marshall’s Awakenings (1990), with Robin Williams, and Scorsese’s mid-career masterpiece Goodfellas (1990). Other carefully chosen roles include Sergio Leone’s much-lauded Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and Roland Jaffe’s The Mission (1986). But even this more than commendable run did not quite fulfill the promise of the previous ten years. In the 1980s, the industry changed; even more important, audience expectations changed (for the worse), and – at age 40 – it is possible that De Niro changed somewhat as well, as we all do. Indeed, perhaps, like Brando, whose talent he approached, De Niro did not want to put himself though the emotional ringer necessary to do his greatest work. In 1987, with two sure-handed efforts, Angel Heart and the Untouchables, his characters more or less loomed over the unfolding action (literally, in each case, in their respective advertising campaigns). Impeccable performances to be sure, but not searching ones.
This is grading on an impossibly unfair curve, but the 1990s were similarly less spectacular when measured against the standard that De Niro had once established—though, again, the best of his twenty performances from 1991 to 1998 would have made an impressive career for most; these included Cape Fear and Casino for Scorsese, Heat (Michael Mann), Jackie Brown (Tarantino), and Ronin (Frankenheimer); in that stretch he also worked with Ron Howard, Barry Levenson, and Alfonso Cuarón, went out of his way to shoot a cameo for Agnes Varda, and directed and starred in the generally well-received A Bronx Tale.
The following quarter century, however, can only be described as disheartening. In fifty-plus feature films De Niro largely gives the impression of a celebrity personality for hire, which, for film lovers, is a great loss; once again perhaps our hero is stepping into Brando’s shoes, and it is hard in both cases not to think of the films that might have made. Certainly De Niro’s more pedestrian choices in late career were not a function of diminishing talent, as seen in the Bernie Madoff biopic The Wizard of Lies (2017) and Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). It is, of course, his life, and he doesn’t owe us anything, but it is nevertheless somehow distressing to imagine that most viewers under forty think of De Niro as “that guy from Meet the Parents and Dirty Grandpa.” To paraphrase one critic trashing an indifferent Bob Dylan album, “it’s as if Shakespeare lived all these years and started writing Jackie Collins novels.”
But that’s not what we’re about, man. We’re here to celebrate the accomplishments, not bemoan what might also have been. And so here’s to one of the all-time greats. The actor who insisted on the need “to totally submerge into another character and experience life through him”; the actor who, as one recent profile described, “redefined what we can expect of an actor.” The actor who, indeed, has “earned consideration on any list of the best actors of all time, especially during a run in the 1970s and 1980s when he was virtually unchallenged for the title.” We’re lucky to have been along for the ride.
