Classic Movie Review:
Dog Day Afternoon
By Josh Spiegel
April 18, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Lumet made many films in his 50-year career, and not all were perfect. (12 Angry Men is a classic, but Lumet also directed The Wiz. Seriously.) But the films Lumet made that were great are among the most iconic American films. From 12 Angry Men, Lumet would go on to direct classics such as Network, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, The Verdict, and Prince of the City. One actor he worked with only twice was Al Pacino; their first collaboration was 1973’s Serpico, but today, we’ll look at their second collaboration: Dog Day Afternoon. Dog Day Afternoon is well-known, at the very least, for a memorable quote: “Attica! Attica!” OK, it’s more of a memorable word than a quote, but the image of Pacino, pacing back and forth outside of a bank, shouting this word to the masses surrounding the bank, is indelible. The film is just as striking.
Dog Day Afternoon is not remembered as Lumet’s finest work; because of its chilling insight into the current state of the mainstream media, Network receives that crown from most critics and scholars. My tastes lie a bit more with 12 Angry Men, but there is no denying the power that Network exudes. Everyone remembers another iconic line: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” And why shouldn’t they? Among American satires, Network stands alongside Dr. Strangelove as being the most incisive, the most insightful, and the most scathing. But Network is also about the people behind the scenes, and while some portraits work (Ned Beatty’s short scene as the head of the company that owns the titular channel is truly frightening), some are almost too cartoonish, even if they’re not wholly unbelievable.
Dog Day Afternoon is less a skewered vision of the world than a plainer look at how tough it gets for people, and how quickly hot tempers and hot temperatures can escalate, spiral out of control. The plot is simple, based on a true story from 1972: two men (there is initially a third, but he chickens out almost immediately) rob a Brooklyn bank. When they realize that they’re too late, and the bulk of the bank’s cash has been taken away in the daily pickup, things start to go wrong. Sonny (Pacino) wants to take some traveler’s checks but leave no traces; this means he has to start a small fire inside the bank that attracts attention from passers-by, who call the police. Suddenly, Sonny and his accomplice Sal (the late John Cazale) are holding the bank employees hostage in front of hundreds of cops, journalists, and onlookers.
The bank robbery movie has been done many times, but rarely has the city of New York been brought to life so aptly, so deftly, as it is in Dog Day Afternoon. Because I saw this after the 2006 thriller Inside Man, it was a little hard to separate where the homages from the latter began and the former’s quality ended. The biggest difference here is that Sonny and Sal aren’t so much threatening as bumbling. Though Sonny clearly worked in a bank (he’s not only smart enough to try and burn the registers the travelers’ checks are logged in, but he knows about other bank-specific procedures), he and Sal start off on the wrong foot when they miss the bigger haul at the beginning.
Though Sonny can sometimes get the upper hand (the infamous line “Attica!” comes from his savvy understanding of the crowd’s hatred for New York cops after a recent riot), he’s mostly unable to see reality coming right around the corner. We all know, watching any movie with a bank robbery, that the criminals almost never get away. When a bank robber such as Sonny makes demands of the cops, demands like a jet, the audience knows they aren’t going to get to fly anywhere, unless it’s a prison transport. The best movies of this kind make us forget that knowledge, and Dog Day Afternoon does an expert job of this. Partly because of how genuinely suspenseful some interactions are in the movie, and partly because I knew little of the true story or the film’s plot, I was pleasantly taken aback at the film’s climax.
Lumet was such a subtle director; his style was almost nonexistent but always present. Sweaty desperation, thy name is Lumet. Here, there’s no question that Sonny is the personification of this theme. His reasoning for robbing the bank is…well, I’m not going to spoil it if you’re not familiar with the film’s twists and turns. Suffice to say, his motivation is absolutely unexpected; even more, Lumet doesn’t reveal this motivation as some major shock (even though it is), letting it flow naturally. The acting in the film is typically impressive, not just because of the names involved but because Lumet was such an actor’s director. There’s a reason why the man worked with people including Pacino, Paul Newman, William Holden, Albert Finney, Fonda, and Rod Steiger.
Pacino is, of course, excellent here, revealing a bit of the manic intensity that’s become his calling card while showing tender emotional range. Cazale, best known as Fredo in The Godfather, is meant to be the more intense of the two robbers, but he’s just as coiled and jittery as Pacino is, only quieter. Charles Durning, always a treat, is great as the New York cop who starts off as Pacino’s only tie to the outside world; their tete-a-tetes are two of the best sequences here. A young Chris Sarandon (the future Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride) plays Leon, who represents more than you may think to Sonny. The two characters have one telephone scene, but the sadness and frustration on both ends is not only impressive, but genuinely surprising in a film that begins as a robbery.
Dog Day Afternoon has had a fine reputation since it opened in 1975. One can only hope its quality will live on now that Lumet has passed on. Frankly, among the more undervalued movies of Lumet’s career, I’d almost say The Verdict ought to be on the same plateau as Network, 12 Angry Men, and this film. Don’t get me wrong: Dog Day Afternoon is great, one of the best films of both Lumet’s and Pacino’s filmographies. But this is also a movie that, when you go into it, you know is supposed to be great. I can say this much about Dog Day Afternoon that I don’t often say about supposed classics: it meets the hype, never disappointing. That’s rarer and rarer these days.