Dog Day Afternoon
Sidney Lumet's
Dog Day Afternoon was a hit when it was released in 1975, and it's not hard to see why. Bank robbers make great folk heroes, and this story was based on real events that took place in Brooklyn's Park Slope in August 1972: Two novice bandits entered a bank, took its employees hostage and almost made a getaway via a small jet they'd procured via negotiations with law-enforcement officials. Their scheme didn't work: One robber was shot by an FBI agent; the other was ultimately sentenced to 20 years. But the incidental elements of the story, as they were later reported in a
Life magazine article, were what made it exceptional: One of the robbers, John Wojtowicz - renamed Sonny Wortzik in the film, and played by Al Pacino - developed a rapport with the hostages. ("If they had been my houseguests on a Saturday night, it would have been hilarious," says Shirley Bell, a bank teller who became one of the hostages. "Especially with John's antics, the way he hopped around all over the place, the way he talked.") But there was a romantic element to the crime as well: John, although he had a wife and two children at home, had recently married another man, Ernest Aron (played in the movie by Chris Sarandon); the nuptials were elaborate, complete with 300 guests and a lavish buffet. Aron desperately wanted a sex-change operation; getting the money for it was Wojtowicz's chief motive for robbing the bank.
One of the remarkable things about Lumet's picture is that it refuses to treat this marriage between two men - certainly unusual at the time - as a novelty.
Dog Day Afternoon is half comedy, half drama, but the gradations between the two elements are so subtle that it's not always possible to distinguish them. That's all part of the movie's artistry, and part of the reason audiences and critics took to it so passionately. The picture also captured a sense of the era's free-floating unrest: To onlookers - in real life and in the movie - the cops were bullies, ostensibly keeping the peace but mostly just throwing their weight around. And in a world that seemed to be unraveling before people's eyes, tenderness was in short supply: A guy robbing a bank out of devotion to the man he calls his wife? That wasn't something you saw every day.
Dog Day Afternoon brings together a number of remarkable elements: As Sonny, Pacino is simultaneously loose-limbed and wound tight, a man whose anxieties and his sense of humor pretty much constitute his life force - it's a marvelous performance. John Cazale is equally terrific as Sonny's partner in crime, Sal, the fictional version of 18-year-old Salvatore Naturile, who was killed at the end of the day-long robbery. With his high, rounded forehead and chin-length hair, Cazale has the profile of a Medici prince; he brings a sense of forlorn nobility to the role.
It was Frank Pierson's screenplay, based on that original
Life magazine article, that attracted Pacino to the project in the first place. He initially rejected the role: He had just completed
The Godfather: Part II (1974), and he was exhausted. He was also hoping to return to the stage. But something about Pierson's storytelling changed his mind: "Pierson had structured [the story] quite beautifully; he really made it sing," Pacino told interviewer Lawrence Grobel. "And Sidney Lumet is a genius in staging; he never tells you a word; just by the way he has you move, the scenes come alive. He pointed me in a direction and said, 'Go here and go there.' It's extraordinary."
Pacino's observations mesh with the way Lumet himself has described his approach. As he says in Frank R. Cunningham's
Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision: "One of the things that thrills me about
Dog Day, we never went into
any background, but it was there, you knew it all. I learned that from Chekhov when I did
The Sea Gull -- there is no exposition, you never know who Konstantin's father was; it is so marvelous not to know much about Masha." Lumet continues: "I had been brought up in such a tradition of psychiatric explanations for everything, and tend to that myself...but one of the reasons you understand so much about what Al does in
Dog Day is because we inject it in the performance, in the non-verbal text."
Lumet's direction apparently gave Pacino the right balance of guidance and freedom, and critics picked up on that idea, too. As Roger Ebert wrote in the
Chicago Sun Times when the picture was released, "Sonny isn't explained or analyzed -- just presented." In that review, Ebert also notes that while the picture sometimes appears to flirt with old gangster-movie clichés, Lumet is "exploring the clichés, not just using them." He also cites the way Lumet captures the energy - sometimes benevolent and sometimes menacing - of the "big-city crowd" that gathers at the crime scene, at first lionizing Sonny and then turning against him when they discover his homosexuality. "But within a short time (New York being New York)," Ebert notes, "gay libbers turn up to cheer him on."
The crowd's response to Sonny and his actions - their willingness to turn him into a celebrity, and their desire to grab a bit of that celebrity for themselves, as evidenced by the pizza guy who makes a delivery to the hostages and holds his arms aloft, crowing, "Hey, I'm a star!" - presaged our contemporary obsession with fame and reality TV. But it's almost too easy, and too glib, to draw that parallel. The emotional potency of
Dog Day Afternoon goes far beyond casual sociological theorizing. Pacino told Grobel, "My friend Charlie Laughton saw the film and said to me, 'Al, do you know what it is like? It is like pulling a pin out of a hand grenade and waiting for it to explode.'" Then he adds, "I remember Lumet saying to me at one point, 'It's out of my hands. It has got its own life.'"
Producers: Martin Bregman, Martin Elfand
Director: Sidney Lumet
Screenplay: Frank Pierson (screenplay); P.F. Kluge, Thomas Moore (article); Leslie Waller (book, uncredited)
Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper
Art Direction: Doug Higgins
Film Editing: Dede Allen
Cast: Al Pacino (Sonny Wortzik), John Cazale (Sal), Charles Durning (Det. Sgt. Eugene Moretti), Chris Sarandon (Leon Shermer), Sully Boyar (Mulvaney), Penelope Allen (Sylvia), James Broderick (Sheldon), Carol Kane (Jenny), Beulah Garrick (Margaret), Sandra Kazan (Deborah).
C-125m. Letterboxed.
by Stephanie Zackarek (Stephanie is the chief movie critic for Movieline - www.movieline.com)
SOURCES:
"The Boys in the Bank," by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, Life Magazine, September 22, 1972
Al Pacino in Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006
Chicago Sun Times
Frank R. Cunningham,
Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision, University Press of Kentucky, 2001
Dog Day Afternoon (2 disc special edition)
Sidney Lumet's 1975 comedy-drama
Dog Day Afternoon, which screenwriter Frank Pierson based on a
Life magazine article, isn't just drawn from a real event. It also encapsulates the spirit of its times as few movies do. In an unprecedented movie year in which
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Shampoo and
Dog Day Afternoonwere all within the top five hits of the year (and not a "Hollywood ending" among them), Lumet's movie, just out in a 2-disc special edition DVD, may be the most emblematic of the apex of the 1970s' golden era of American film.
In 1975, the bloom was most definitely off the American rose. The national fatigue of 1975 (Vietnam, Watergate, economic woes) is all over
Dog Day Afternoon. It's in the desperate face and body language of Sonny (Al Pacino), whose attempt to rob a bank is a last-ditch stab at turning his unhappy life around. It's in the hang-dog presence of John Cazale (
The Godfather,
The Conversation) as Sonny's partner in crime, Sal. It's in the reactions of the bank employees they take hostage and of the gathering throngs lining the block outside the bank, who identify more with Sonny than with the onslaught of gun-toting cops aiming at him. It's in the harried detective (Charles Durning) trying to negotiate with Sonny, increasingly frustrated that no one respects his authority.
That national fatigue is also in the very style of
Dog Day Afternoon. Starting with its hot-time-summer-in-the-city montage during the opening credits, the emphasis is on realism. Big eastern cities were not pretty places in the 1970s, with the 1950s' and 1960s' flight to suburbia taking a lot of urban investment money with it, and the opening captures the grime of 1970s New York. You can feel the heat rising from the litter-strewn sidewalks as mid-afternoon approaches. But the goal here isn't just realism, its unconventional realism.
Dog Day Afternoon upends just about every heist-movie convention you've come to expect.
Most obviously, its robbers aren't movie tough guys. We see that right away when one, Stevie (Gary Springer), chickens out and begs Sonny to let him leave the bank (Sonny lets him go). Sonny and quiet Sal, however edgy they might be, are amateurs. They're not mere crooks. For one thing, they're funny as hell, Sonny answering the phone "WNEW plays all the hits," like a disc jockey, and Sal, when asked what country he'd want to escape to, replying "Wyoming." Sonny tries to look like a tough guy, barking to the cops that he'll start throwing dead hostages out the front door if they don't meet his demands, but he puts on no such airs with the bank employees, who he pledges not to hurt. When we later learn Sonny is bisexual, having a male "wife," Leon (Chris Sarandon), as well as his female wife Angie (Susan Peretz), he becomes an even more uncommon character.
For all its contentious face-offs and threats of violence and for all of Pacino's intensity in one of his most well-rounded performances,
Dog Day Afternoon is also full of still moments that deepen its drama. Like the humor you wouldn't expect from a hostage story, the intimate phone conversation between Sonny and Leon, whose expensive sex-change operation is the motivation for the robbery, and the hushed scene in which Sonny dictates his will, including equal affection for Angie and Leon in it, are touching contrasts to the more boisterous action.
Leon and Sonny's phone conversation was originally written to be a face-to-face conversation on the street, in front of the police and the onlookers. But Pacino campaigned to change that and Pierson rewrote the scene as a quieter phone call, incorporating Pacino's and Sarandon's rehearsal improvisations into his final version of the scene. Such moments remind us that there are three major elements to
Dog Day Afternoon: the dark humor, the craziness happening outside the bank (much of it instigated by Sonny during his visits to the sidewalk) and the drama leading to the inevitable moment when the police and FBI either meet Sonny and Sal's demands or make a move to stop them.
The amazing thing about Lumet's audio commentary and the new hour-long documentary about the making of the movie on the DVD is that any effort to capture the spirit of the times in the 1975 movie remains unmentioned.
It just happened. Sonny's famous "Attica! Attica!" line? It happened on the spur of the moment, a suggestion quietly offered to Pacino by assistant director Burtt Harris. The crowd didn't know it was coming, yet reacted with fervor. The same crowd's preference of Sonny over the swarm of cops and its distrust of authority? Not a big deal to the moviemakers. Sonny as a disgruntled Vietnam vet? The service record of the real robber, John Wojtowicz, was already part of the story, not something added for effect.
Both interesting extras concentrate on the storytelling more than the context of the movie. On both, Lumet talks about how one way to pump up the desired naturalism was to do away with some of the moviemaking artificiality: having much of the cast, including anyone playing a character in the bank, wear his or her own clothes; having everyone speak in their own voices (no accents); and not using any sort of lighting beyond what would have been there in a real bank robbery/hostage situation. For instance, the bank scenes are lit by fluorescent lighting and the nighttime street scenes by police flood lights.
Although some reference sources list
Dog Day Afternoon as being 130 minutes long, it runs 124 minutes on the DVD. It's unclear whether anything was cut between the movie's original theatrical release and its 1980s home video debut. The disc contains no deleted scenes but the trailer offers a little interesting snippet not in the finished film. Its very first images are of Sonny, addressing his hostages before they leave the bank for the airport limo, telling them "you're gonna be remembered the rest of your lives for the day you got held up and kidnapped." The movie is certainly still remembered, and for good reason.
For more information about
Dog Day Afternoon, visit
Warner Video. To order
Dog Day Afternoon, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman
