Dog Day Afternoon

Happy New Year online readers! I would like to start this year off with a series of amazing films that star one of the most powerful actors in the industry, Al Pacino. Unlike how I usually just do a Friday review, there will be a review every Monday, Wednesday and Friday of this month of his movies. Let’s kick this month off with the 1975 classic, “Dog Day Afternoon.”

This movie is Sidney Lumet’s most accurate, most showy New York movie – that consistently crucial and energetic Lumet genre which also has “The Pawnbroker” and “Serpico” and exists completely surrounded by (but always separate from) the rest of his work. Lumet’s New York movies include many features of the city’s life as they are stories of the city’s life.

“Dog Day Afternoon” is a melodrama, based on an actual event, about a tragically bad planned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it’s wonderfully acted by actors who appear to have grown on the city’s sidewalks in the heat and depression of an endless midsummer.

Vincent Canby advised, “If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation.”

Each of the many major lives it touches has been grotesquely bent out of shape. The director and Frank Pierson, who wrote the great screenplay, don’t try to give reasons. The movie only says what happened and no more. This strictly limits the film’s emotional part, but not its seriousness or its fascinations. Canby describes this movie as “a gaudy street-carnival of a movie that rudely invites laughs at inappropriate moments, which is in keeping with the city's concrete sensibility.”

Since I wasn’t around for the actual event, I will let Canby tell you about it: “The incident on which the film is based was the attempt to rob a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Aug. 22, 1972. The two bandits, one of whom was seeking money for a sex-change operation for a boyfriend, failed miserably, after they held the bank's employes hostage for 14 hours, appeared live on television, became the center of an impromptu neighborhood Mardi Gras, and negotiated for a jet plane to fly them out of the country.”

Lumet’s film is mainly concerned with the robbery attempt and the time it took. Only briefly does the camera view outside and away from the lower-middle-class neighborhood of apartments over pizza parlors, barber shops and barrooms. Once in a while we see the neighborhood in a high, cloudy long-shot, the tar-paper shingles shining in the reflected heat.

Mostly the film takes place inside the bank. This concentration in space and time is responsible for a good majority of the film’s dramatic strength.

Also are the brilliant characterizations by the actors in this large cast, including Pacino, who Canby says is “as the (probably) more than a bit mad mini-mind of the holdup, a man with bravura style when he plays to the crowds outside the bank but apparently quite demented in his personal relationships.”

He promises his love for his wife (Susan Peretz) and children and even his boyfriend, who he “married” in a drag wedding a few months earlier with his mother (Judith Malina) as a witness. On the other hand, his boyfriend, played with just the right combination of fear, dignity and absurdity by Chris Sarandon (Susan Sarandon’s ex-husband), shows that his would-be supporter has tried to kill him many times.

The other actors that everyone who has seen this movie remembers are Penny Allen as the bank’s professional head teller, Estelle Omens as a woman teller at that age who is against profanity especially under stress (“My ears aren’t garbage cans”), John Cazale as Pacino’s sidekick in the robbery, a man who doesn’t smoke because “the body is the temple of the Lord,” and James Broderick (Matthew Broderick’s dad) and Charles Dunning as the main officers of the law. Of certain interest is Peretz as Pacino’s wife, who we see the twist of city pain, anger, charm and violence, which is one of the things that “Dog Day Afternoon” is all about.

What everyone remembers about this movie is Pacino out in the street yelling, “Attica! Attica! Attica!” This has become one of the most memorable quotes ever in film history. If you haven’t seen this movie, what are you waiting for? If you’re a Pacino fan, watch it and you’ll like it. This is one of my favorites.

Look out for more excitement next week for “Al Pacino Month.”