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John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk: He was Hollywood’s master of the everyday, an actor who looked, felt, and even squealed like one of us.

He was Hollywood’s master of the everyday, an actor who looked, felt, and even squealed like one of us.

he’s so strange-looking.” The speaker is Steve Buscemi, one of the principal talking heads of “I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale,” a 2009 documentary that helped inspire a fresh flurry of interest in the actor’s short career. (This was the era when Dustin Hoffman beat out Robert Redford for the lead in “ The Graduate.”) For most of the sixties, Cazale acted Off Broadway and made extra money as a cabdriver or as a messenger for Standard Oil, where one of his co-workers happened to be Al Pacino. The war between “us” (despicable but still human) and the machine people (in the right but sociopathic) is more or less the point of “Dog Day Afternoon,” Cazale’s third film with Pacino and the one where he pushed past ordinary humdrum brilliance and made it all the way to perfection.

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