Dog Day Afternoon, a nominee for Best Picture of 1975, tells the story of a bank robbery that goes wrong in so many ways. Two would-be robbers, Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale), attempt to hold up the First Brooklyn Savings Bank at closing time one hot August day. From the start, they seem destined to fail. A third robber, Stevie (Gary Springer), quits almost as soon as the robbery begins, claiming that he "just can't go through with it." And it all goes downhill from there.
The film was based upon a real-life incident that occurred in 1972, and the opening sequence gives a series of very telling images of New York in the early 1970s. Very quickly you are returned to that Vietnam era malaise, that time of Nixon era distrust of authority and power. Much of the action of the film is confined to just the bank interior and the street outside the bank, making Dog Day Afternoon very claustrophobic to watch, further contributing to the unease that the era recalls. You get a strong sense of the intensity of the pressure that the robbers, particularly Sonny, are facing.
Just a few of the sequence of events that mar what had been planned as a quick heist: By the time Sonny and Sal show up, the bank has already been emptied of its deposits for the day, leaving only $1100 in the vault. The security guard has asthma and has to be released almost immediately after the robbery begins. The cops overreact when the security guard is released, thinking that he is one of the robbers, and attack him as soon as he exits the bank. The smoke from when Sonny attempts to burn the register catches the attention of an insurance salesman across the street, and he is probably the one who calls the police. The boyfriend of one of the tellers being held hostage breaks through a police barricade and attacks Sonny. And on and on and on. It's a series of mishaps that could have easily been played for comedy, but director Sidney Lumet chose instead to present them as "realistic" events, allowing viewers a chance to see how the frustrations that Sonny and Sal feel continue to mount as the movie progresses.
Watching this film again almost single-handedly rescues Pacino's reputation for me. He has given so many ham-fisted performances over the years, most notably in Scent of a Woman, for which he finally (and undeservedly) won an Oscar for Best Actor. However, in Dog Day Afternoon, he's fantastic. He allows you to see all of the burdens that Sonny carries, the pressures of trying to make a living in a depressed economy, enduring a nagging wife and an overbearing mother and a resentful father, and perhaps the biggest revelation of all, his love for a pre-operative transsexual named Leon, whom the cops bring from the mental institution where he is being treated in order to make Sonny confront his "wife" in hopes of ending the stalemate. Watching the phone conversations Pacino's Sonny has, first with Leon and then with his female wife Angie, is pretty gripping. He's just talking on the phone, but it's difficult to turn away. The same is true for when he dictates his will to one of the tellers. The emotions he allows himself to display are deep and heartfelt, and it's one of his best performances in a long career.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention just how remarkably prescient this film was about the lure of fame. Sonny becomes a hero of the streets when hundreds of police officers show up, and he defies them with his shouts of "Attica! Attica! Attica!"--referring, of course, to the brutal put-down of a prison riot that had happened one year earlier. Each time he emerges from the bank to talk to either the police or the FBI, the crowd cheers. Sonny even starts to preen a bit before the cameras. It's as if he's gotten a bit too caught up in the drama himself and wants to provide a good show for everyone, and the crowed responds loudly to his efforts.
Well, I should clarify that the crowd cheers him for a while. Once news of Sonny's romance with Leon is made public--including a photo of Leon in a wedding dress--the tone shifts. The crowd begins making loud jeers and catcalls when Sonny frisks an FBI agent before allowing him into the bank to see the hostages. A group of gay rights activists, with several trans people in the front, appear to cheer Sonny on, and the crowd quickly divides into two camps. I don't believe the film is homophobic, as some have claimed over the years. It seems to me that the filmmakers are portraying the homophobic attitudes people of the time had. I know that sounds like a fine line I'm trying to draw, but the film itself doesn't seem to judge Pacino's Sonny, in particular. He is a bisexual bank robber who's trying to help his parents pay their rent and keep his wife and kids fed and collect enough money to pay for his lover's gender-reassignment surgery. He's allowed to be a complex character and, I might add, a rather sympathetic one at that.
I'd like to single out a couple of members of the supporting cast for special attention. Cazale, who had such a short career in film before his death at age 42, is quite effective as the weaker, more uncertain of the two robbers. Chris Sarandon plays Leon in a much more restrained fashion than you might have expected in a Hollywood film of the 1970s. Charles Durning plays the police detective Moretti, who's desperate to end the hold-up with no casualties, and James Broderick (Matthew's dad and later the patriarch on the TV show Family) is the FBI agent who takes over from Moretti and starts a game of cat-and-mouse with Sonny. I was also particularly impressed by the performance of Penelope Allen as Sylvia, the head bank teller. She's a no-nonsense kind of woman, the kind who returns to be with the other hostages because, as she puts it, "They're my girls. I'm going back in there." She's a treasure.
When Cazale's Sal complains that the news reports are identifying both of the bank robbers as homosexuals, Sonny replies that it's all just a "freak show" for them. In a way, that's really what Dog Day Afternoon does best: showing us just how quickly a circus can form around a single event, how frenzied the crowd can become, how overheated the emotions can be in a short period of time. The ending of the film has to be seen, not described, but it packs a pretty strong emotional punch after what has transpired in a little more than two hours on the screen. Dog Day Afternoon is another strong addition to the reputation of the 1970s as one of the greatest decades in filmmaking.
Oscar Win: Original Screenplay
Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Director, Actor (Pacino), Supporting Actor (Sarandon), and Film Editing
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