Wake Up With Al Pacino’s Speech from ‘City Hall’

Political week concludes on the Wake Up.

“City Hall” is perhaps the least known of the films from that phase of Al Pacino’s career where every role he took had to come with a showstopper Oscar Bait Big Speech. From “And Justice For All” through “Scent of a Woman” to “Any Given Sunday,” they’re all the same. They play out like a symphony. The soft beginning, where he’s the beaten down, world-weary guy losing his spirit. It gradually builds to where he’s vowing to fight one last fight. It reaches a crescendo. Then he hits this high register like a car alarm. Like in this one, where he hits that “This CITY! Your CITY! Our CITY!!!!” note that only Pacino can reach. If a real mayor actually talked like that, he’d probably get laughed off of YouTube. But when he does it, it’s almost believable. Anyway, he finally gave up the Big Speech thing around the time he played himself singing and dancing about Dublin’s coffee in “Jack & Jill.” But it was fun while it lasted.