Featured Movies
Partners
Dog Day Afternoon
Fortgang
Dog Day Afternoon was the second collaboration between director Sydney Lumet and Al Pacino, coming two years after Serpico, and it racked up an array of firsts. This was the first mainstream American film to deal with transgender issues without sniggering behind its hand. It was the first film to deal with a televised hold-up, and it was among the first films to cast a major lead actor as explicitly bisexual, even if the proposed kiss between Pacino and John Cazale never quite came about.
The story, though based on real events, has the lurid quality of something cooked up by Paul Morrissey for Joe Dallesandro in Flesh, Trash or Heat. But Lumet, a director whose 1970s movies were bittersweet love notes to his native New York, went to great lengths to avoid a sensationalist look-at-the-crazy-fag film. It deals with hysteria, but it's rarely hysterical, and Pacino - nominated for an Oscar alongside Lumet - maintains such a fevered pitch throughout that he had to be hospitalised for exhaustion during the shoot.
Sonny Wortzik (Pacino) needs the money to pay for lover Leon's (Sarandon) sex change operation. Holding up the local branch of Chase Manhattan shouldn't take long, he figures, and accomplice Sal (Cazale) is on hand to do whatever Sonny cannot. That turns out to be most things, and as a result of his ineptitude the robbery degenerates into a siege. Then, once the press turn up, it becomes a media circus with Sonny as jittery ringmaster, before disintegrating into tragedy.
Chaos hovers over every scene but Lumet's handling of the material is deceptively disciplined. His explicit aim for the film was that it should have the look and feel of real news footage, but for all its ambition, Dog Day Afternoon is distinguished by its absences. There's no score apart from a snatch of Elton John over the opening sequence. Screenwriter Frank Pierson took the only Oscar, but much of the dialogue - particularly that spoken by incidental characters - was improvised during rehearsal. There's limited artificial lighting, the extras were instructed to wear their own clothes, and the crowd scenes were fleshed out with hundreds of Brooklyn locals.
Like the reportage it seeks to replicate, everything here happens at once. There are moments of absurd comedy, social satire, and the film's unafraid to explore a wound which in 1975 was still raw in the American psyche - the Attica prison riots, the institutional uprising that resulted in 19 inmates being shot dead in the back. Lumet commiserates with Sonny's desperation but, appropriately for a film that deals with the spectacle of tragedy, the film never strives for an explanation. Asked why he's robbing a bank, Sonny's got it covered: "I'm robbing a bank because they got money here. That's why I'm robbing it!"
Lumet's film was released a year before Taxi Driver, and it's interesting to compare the two. Both Sonny and Travis Bickle are disoriented Vietnam vets. Both are flailing in an America that's taken its hands off the wheel and put its foot on the floor, and both settle for solutions born out of extreme desperation. But whereas Bickle's bitterness and belligerence - and De Niro's own primitive force - made Scorsese's film an angry classic about an outsider heading further out, Pacino's nervous energy and Lumet's sympathetic approach make Dog Day Afternoon a quieter but equally significant film about a hopeless, hot-headed loser who just wants to come in from the cold.
|
