`DEVIL'S ADVOCATE' MADE HIM DO IT; PACINO SAVORS THE ULTIMATE BAD-GUY ROLE.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Daily News Staff Writer

He's malicious. He's short-tempered. But there's something very tempting about him - especially playing him.

The devil. He's a hell of a guy.

In ``The Devil's Advocate,'' Al Pacino gets the ultimate bad-guy role - a tempter and manipulator capable of wreaking havoc at will or driving people to their own destructive behavior.

The Oscar-winning actor is the latest in a long line of top-flight thespians - including Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson - who have succumbed to the lure of playing the Prince of Darkness.

Robert Banks of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, a founder of the City of Angels Film Festival, said that in Hollywood ``the devil never seems to have gone totally out of fashion.''

Banks suggested a couple of reasons for Lucifer's renewed popularity as a dramatic subject.

``It used to be old hat, done that, heard it in Sunday school. Now he's fresher,'' he said. ``If it's true that there is a minor spiritual revival going on, then it makes sense that people would be thinking about the devil more.''

With this film, screenwriters Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy suggest that the time is right to bring Satan to the public's attention. Pacino's character says no one would argue that the 20th century is his domain. ``I'm peaking,'' he adds.

The Warner Bros. movie has Pacino as head of a large New York law firm and Keanu Reeves as a go-getter young associate who has been lured to sign on with a combination of big bucks, lavish perks and ego strokes.

Sort of like ``The Firm'' meets ``Faust.''

End-all lawyer joke

Or maybe it's the end-all lawyer joke. Beelzebub the barrister.

Pacino said the script gave director Taylor Hackford and him plenty of leeway to make what they wanted of the role. He said they envisioned a ``more modern devil,'' yet Pacino prepared for it by reading Dante's ``Inferno'' and Milton's ``Paradise Lost'' and studying other actors' film portrayals of the devil.

He said he found playing evil incarnate both terrifying and fulfilling.

``It was gratifying to be able to play a character that, you know, you can do almost anything with,'' he said. ``The thing I kept thinking about was ... what was it like? Is it like being someone who's been here all the time and is still with us?''

Pacino said one of the advantages of this character is the creative latitude it affords. ``How are you going to be judged really? You can't say, `He didn't do that.' Anything goes, really.''

If he will be judged by anything, it probably will be all the other screen incarnations of the devil.

``Faust,'' Goethe's account of a German astrologer who sold his soul in exchange for power and knowledge, was made into motion pictures eight times from 1900 to 1925, all silents. Experts say the definitive version is the last of those, directed by Friederich Murnau.

Other well-known characterizations: Pacino's favorite, Walter Huston in ``The Devil and Daniel Webster'' (1941), Laird Cregar in ``Heaven Can Wait'' (1943), Peter Cook in ``Bedazzled'' (1967) and Max von Sydow in ``Needful Things'' (1993).

Satan surfaced several times in 1987, including Robert De Niro's long-nailed Louis Cyphre in ``Angel Heart'' and Jack Nicholson's impish, oversexed Daryl Van Horne in ``The Witches of Eastwick.''

Name but no face

Hollywood dares to speak his name but won't always show his face, as in Roman Polanski's ``Rosemary's Baby'' (1968). Mia Farrow becomes the unwilling mother of the devil's offspring in a film that did for hormonally imbalanced pregnant women what ``Jaws'' did for ocean swimmers.

``The Exorcist,'' which made Mephistopheles a box-office superstar in 1973, showed he's apt to set up housekeeping anywhere, even in an innocent 12-year-old girl, transforming her into a head-spinning, pea-soup-spewing demon with a trucker's vocabulary.

That led to Damien Thorn in ``The Omen'' (1976), also known as the devil in knee pants. Then there was ``Christine'' (1983), a Stephen King tale about a 1958 Plymouth Fury (what else?) with an ``unholy presence.''

``Damn Yankees,'' the 1958 movie version of Broadway's Faustian musical comedy, showed that filmdom's Satan doesn't always get his way.

In it Ray Walston played Mr. Applegate, who answers a frustrated baseball fan's offhand remark that he would sell his soul for one good hitter on his team. In the musical tradition of happy endings, Applegate admits defeat to the hero's good nature and devotion to his wife.

Walston explained his approach to playing the devil successfully, whether he is Applegate or a more threatening type.

`Evil quality'

``The evil quality of it is very attractive, but if the actor succumbs to that evil quality so much that that's it, that's all he plays, then he's lost the game,'' Walston said. ``It has to be approached with great honesty with this in mind: that no matter what kind of character you play, as in human life with all of us, there is always something that is good in them. Most actors, I have to say, miss the boat in that department.''

Maria de la Carreras Kuntz, a professor at UCLA's Department of Film and Television, says the world as depicted in recent films has ``no moral absolutes,'' but stories featuring Satan answer a need for clearcut good and evil.

``The devil makes for a very dramatic figure, because anything representing evil is part of the human experience. We all sin,'' she said. ``I wouldn't say that this is a trend, but it's a permanent fascination. It taps into man's primal experiences of life.''

Theologian Banks said he believes movies that portray the devil as an ordinary person - a neighbor, co-worker or child - are far more frightening than those that make him obviously evil from the outset.

``The other can startle you and make your flesh creep, but I think the devil coming in the back door is much scarier,'' Banks said. ``If God is powerfully present in such simple things as bread and wine - and it wasn't always an elaborate ritual, it was just a meal - then I presume evil has the same characteristic.''

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Photo: `It was gratifying to be able to play a character that ... you can do almost anything with. The thing I kept thinking about was ... what was it like? Is it like being someone who's been here all the time and is still with us?'

Al Pacino

on his role in ``The Devil's Advocate''