Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon" is one of the most peculiar, most offbeat and deeply involving crime pictures I've ever seen. Most bank robbery pictures since the 1970's revelled in the criminal element and the extreme violence, though usually the bank robbery was often a mere glimpse, a brief passage. Not so with "Dog Day Afternoon" where the robbery itself is mostly an afterthought - the robbers figure into the action and the whole film takes place in the bank on one especially humid summer day.
Anxiety-ridden Sonny Wortzik (a spry Al Pacino) is ready to rob a Brooklyn bank with the help of the sinister, deadly quiet Salvatore "Sal" Naturile (John Cazale), though one other robber during the robbery in progress gets cold feet and flees. Trouble brews right from the start as they find that the bank vault only carries $1,100 rather than the huge amounts of cash they were expecting. Sonny has knowledge of the bank and their registers and what may trigger any alarms yet a small fire in a trash can where he burns the register brings the cops to the scene quickly (the vents show the smoke from the outside). This has now developed into a hostage situation with the bank tellers, the diabetic manager and the asthmatic security guard as the hostages. The air-conditioning doesn't work, the tactical police units are ready to barrel through the back entrance, and Sonny and Sal are left with their pants down. All they can do is ask for pizza, sodas (no beer) and a jet plane to take them to Algeria!
The purpose behind this robbery is not for Sonny to have extra bucks to live on but to pay for a sex change operation for his lover and new wife, Leon Shermer (Chris Sarandon). The remarkable thing about "Dog Day Afternoon" is that the screenplay by Frank Pierson doesn't revolve around this robbery motive or the specifics of the robbery alone but rather the environment of this chaotic situation. Eventually Leon is brought in to this crisis from Bellevue hospital and what occurs is a phone conversation between Sonny and Leon, though they are literally right next door to each other. It is both dramatic and sad since Leon doesn't want to continue a relationship with the temperamental Sonny - such a scene could occur inside their own home. The fact that this is during a failed bank robbery is not central to the film's effectiveness - "Dog Day Afternoon" is not really a crime picture but rather about the distilled humanity of a group of people who have nothing in common with each other. Sonny knows the ins and out of banks but otherwise he is just an average guy who becomes a celebrity with the spectators after yelling "Attica, Attica!" - you have to have some knowledge of Attica as a deadly prison massacre from years earlier. And after being shown on television, Sonny's marriage to Leon becomes public and he gets support from the gay community. As for the bank tellers, they grow accustomed to Sonny seeing him less as a threat and more of a misunderstood soul. Only Sal proves to still be a quiet threat.
"Dog Day Afternoon" is not a rudimentary thriller nor a violent action piece. In fact, the only violence occurs at the end and it is very brief. The movie thrives on the mounting tension between the cops, the hostage negotiations and Sonny and Sal. In today's world of violent cinema, you know some hostages would've been killed and there would have been a Mexican standoff of some sort in its finale. "Dog Day Afternoon" is surprisingly chaste and all the better for it (check out 1973's "Friends of Eddie Coyle" for similarly less violent, anarchic situations). Lumet places us the viewer squarely in the bank, and everything else is seen from Sonny's point-of-view. Infrequently we see other points of view such as the hundreds of cops getting ready to fire, and we get the frustrated Sergeant Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) who just wants this extremely volatile situation to end. Pacino in particular conveys so much without overacting - one of his finest, most emotionally centered roles ever. Sonny's like a puppy dog with big brown eyes lost in the confusion of his own life - his other wife, Angie (Susan Peretz), who is quite loquacious, is lost in this mess as well. I can't begin to describe my effusive praise for "Dog Day Afternoon" other than saying I did not want it to end - a day of chaos that is both exhausting and exhilarating.
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