Film review

  • Dog Day Afternoon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet  (1975)

    [Two impressions of the film from viewings in the 1970s and 2023 …]

    Take 1

    On August 22nd 1972, at about 3pm, Sonny Wortzik and his friend Salvatore (Sal) Naturile held up a small Brooklyn bank.  An alarm was tripped, the police arrived in force, and the would-be robbers were trapped, along with the staff, inside the hot, airless building (it was ninety-seven degrees outside).  During the evening, the New York police acceded to Wortzik’s demands for transport to Kennedy airport and a jet to the destination of his choice.  At the airport the only aimed gunshot of the entire proceedings was fired, by an FBI man, and killed Naturile.  Wortzik was tried and received a twenty-year prison sentence.

    Sonny Wortzik needed money to finance a sex-change operation for his male ‘wife’, Leon Shermer (who now lives as a woman in New York).  When Martin Bregman and Martin Elfand, the producers of Dog Day Afternoon, first acquired the rights to the story (for a song:  once the film was a success, writs flew thick and fast), they intended to make an exploitation parody movie called ‘The Boys in the Bank’.  Fortunately, the project underwent drastic revision before it reached the screen in late 1975, with a screenplay by Frank Pierson.  The resulting film, well directed by Sidney Lumet, is a skilful and entertaining tragicomedy.  Pierson’s (Oscar-winning) script is full of small, intelligent observations; Lumet’s direction gives the story an odd, farcical energy.  He economically establishes time and place through an opening montage of shots of sweltering, stupefied New Yorkers, accompanied by the sound of blabbing local news reports.  These bulletins persist throughout, with the stakeout of the bank becoming the lead story.  Although Dog Day Afternoon is sometimes self-consciously frenetic, Lumet successfully develops a sense of the overwhelming heat making people’s actions all the crazier.

    It’s not long before the female staff-hostages realise the robbers’ desperation and lack of criminal confidence, start to sympathise with Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale), and resent the police’s clumsy, aggressive tactics.  The women almost get to enjoy being celebrities for a day, although their sporadic excessively high spirits reflect their underlying fear.  The fickle crowd in the street – supporting Sonny when he starts rabble-rousing with yells of ‘Attica!’[1], jeering when they first learn he’s homosexual – wallows in vicarious thrills and proximity to minor history-in-the-making.  Lumet’s narrative juxtaposes, obviously but effectively, the highly personal nature of Sonny’s mission with its public consequences.  Scores of police crouch, hands on holsters.  Busloads of press photographers arrive at the scene of the crime.  Sonny and Sal are the centre of attention but alone too, as far as help and genuine sympathy are concerned.

    The performances are first rate.  Al Pacino’s delivery of a last-will-and-testament speech is especially impressive:  his deadpan reading suggests Sonny’s sudden realisation of how bizarre his situation is – for a few moments, he’s listening almost objectively to the extraordinary legacy that he’s announcing.  John Cazale conveys very well how Sal’s awareness of his desperate inarticulacy adds to his fear.  The eye contact between Pacino and Cazale ensures the non-verbal communication between Sonny and Sal is more eloquent than most of their words.

    A third important acting contribution comes from Chris Sarandon, as the frightened, fragile Leon.  The break-in happens soon after the start of Dog Day Afternoon.  Lumet builds tension in the few minutes of screen time leading up to it but once Sonny and Sal are in the bank, developments outside it are required to sustain momentum.   The scenes of Leon in a police station certainly do that but also introduce a refreshingly different rhythm.  An NYPD detective (excellent Charles Durning) listens, calmly but with increasing shocked incredulity, to the story of Leon’s and Sonny’s relationship before setting up a phone call between them – a conversation punctuated by very convincing stumbles, pauses and expressions of the lovers’ feelings for each other. The bank employees include Sully Boyar (the portly, diabetic, amusingly unsurprised manager), Marcia Jean Kurtz, Carol Kane and Penelope Allen.  James Broderick is the coldly smirking FBI man who eventually shoots Sal.

    [1970s]

     

    Take 2

     In fact, Take 3:  I’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon between the 1970s and now but didn’t record my impressions at the time.  I doubt they’d have been much different from first impressions:  my feelings about Sidney Lumet’s film still haven’t changed much – in contrast to other films on this blog with double-take entries (Goodfellas (1990), Sebastiane (1976)).  This note will gloss just a couple of points …

    The ripples of audience laughter at the start of this NFT1 screening surprised me, though I don’t know why:  it was only the usual we-must-make-clear-we’re-having-a-good-time noise which, also as usual, petered out after a while.  Ironic then that in the early stages Sidney Lumet and his cast don’t encourage this kind of reaction but do sometimes encourage it further into the narrative.  The situation in the bank is remarkably bizarre from the start but the robbers’ uncertainty is hardly comical:  it invites immediate sympathy for their plight as well as that of their hostages.  (This is especially well illustrated as Sonny fumbles the removal of his gun from the gift box that was meant to conceal it.)  Later on, Lumet allows some overplaying among the bank employees as they relish their sudden, unexpected celebrity.  This impression probably does have to do with the passage of time:  everyone-will-be-famous-for-fifteen-minutes syndrome has become such a cliché that the emphasis given to it here now seems crudely superfluous.  And Lumet tends to overwork scenes involving the crowd that gathers outside the bank.  Their fickle reactions to the robbery, even though you accept the essential truth of them, are too staged.

    But the main players – Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon and Charles Durning – are wonderful.  Each of them has good comedy moments; none of them lets you forget what a confused, sad story this is.  Two sequences that felt like highlights forty-odd years ago still do.   The exchange between Sonny in the bank and Leon, flanked by police and FBI men, is one of modern Hollywood’s most memorable phone conversations.  The second standout is Sonny’s dictation of his will to Sylvia (Penelope Allen), the bank’s senior teller.  Pacino’s work in both these scenes is a wonderful advertisement for Method acting (and Sonny Wortzik remains one of his finest screen creations).  In a previous, grimly funny outburst, Sonny angrily lists all the things he’s responsible for in the crazy situation that he has caused; this ends with his asking the bank manager, in sarcastic exasperation, ‘You want me to give you the gun – you want to take over?’   The provisions of Sonny’s will are comparably complicated but the tone and tempo of this scene quite different from that earlier litany; they have more in common with the phone conversation with Leon.  Dog Day Afternoon (although perhaps a few minutes too long) is always entertaining.  But Sidney Lumet, by taking his foot off the pedal in the later stages, develops a more distinctive rhythm – an almost tragic momentum.  Al Pacino has a lot to do with this; the great John Cazale, as saturnine, ill-fated Sal, has even more.

    17 August 2023

    [1]  Afternote:  The chant refers to the uprising at New York’s Attica prison in 1971.

  • The Bigamist

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ida Lupino (1953)

    Ida Lupino became the first woman in the sound era to direct herself in a mainstream American movie when she made The Bigamist.  This was her sixth feature in four years but Lupino didn’t direct another film for more than a decade and her next one, The Trouble with Angels (1966), would be her last.  Although she kept busy until the late 1970s directing television, as well as acting in films and TV, The Bigamist’s merits are cause for real regret that Lupino wasn’t able to continue her career as a cinema director.

    Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien) and his wife Eve (Joan Fontaine) live in San Francisco though Harry is often working at the Los Angeles office of the home freezer business that the couple owns.  The Grahams are childless – Eve is infertile – and they want to adopt a child.  In the opening scene they’re interviewed at an adoption agency by a Mr Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), who tells them that, as a matter of procedure, he needs to investigate their background and current circumstances.  That sparks an instant worried look from Harry and instant suspicion on the part of Jordan:  the husband’s evident discomfort is in sharp contrast to his wife’s smiling eagerness for the adoption process to be completed as speedily as possible.  A determined sleuth, Jordan visits Los Angeles but can find no record of Harry as a guest in the local hotels where he supposedly stays.  He finds a ‘Harrison Graham’ listed in the LA phone directory and calls at the relevant address.  Harry answers the door; Jordan has hardly got inside before he hears a baby crying.  Harry admits this is his child and that he is married to the baby’s mother.  With the appalled adoption agent about to phone the police, Harry begs for a chance to explain the situation that made him a bigamist.  Jordan reluctantly agrees to listen.

    The Bigamist gets off to a pedestrian start:  Harry’s telegraphed furtive behaviour at the interview leads into a bit of laboured comedy, involving Jane Darwell as the nosey office cleaner who interrupts Jordan’s attempts to impart his first impressions of the Grahams to a Dictaphone.  The extended flashback that represents Harry’s explanation to Jordan and occupies most of the film’s eighty minutes makes for a slightly lumpy structure.  Nearly every individual scene that the flashback comprises is strong in itself, though, and Ida Lupino’s approach to all three of her principals – the husband and his two wives – is sympathetic and nuanced.  Harry has broken the law and betrayed both Eve and Phyllis Martin (Lupino), who becomes the second Mrs Graham:  neither woman knows of the other’s existence.  Yet The Bigamist isn’t sensationalist or censorious.  Harry may have done wrong but not because he’s a bad man.  Things just happened that way.

    The performances are excellent.  Lupino clearly liked working with Edmond O’Brien, who had also starred in her previous film, The Hitch-Hiker (released earlier in 1953).  In his late thirties at the time, O’Brien was definitely a character actor rather than a matinee idol:  for a while here, you may be baffled as to how he’s managed to attract Joan Fontaine or Ida Lupino.  But O’Brien’s doughy, ordinary appearance pays increasing dividends and expresses convincingly Harry’s combination of neediness and somewhat weak will (though he does try for as long as he can to keep his friendship with Phyllis platonic).  At first, Joan Fontaine’s Eve seems an ideal wife – beautiful, brainy yet supportive – but you gradually see how her witty efficiency could pall.  It’s this quality, rather than Eve’s inability to bear children, that puts distance – emotional as well as geographical – between Harry and her.

    A particularly fine sequence sees the Grahams playing host to the couple’s lawyer (Kenneth Tobey) and a senior business contact called Forbes (James Todd).  Eve sparkles not just socially but in her charming display of technical knowledge of the workings of freezers.  ‘Why didn’t you ever send your wife in to sell to me?’ Forbes asks Harry, ‘she packs quite a punch’.  ‘Haven’t you heard?  Eve’s the brains, I’m the brawn,’ Harry replies.  Eve then insists she’s ‘just Harry’s little secretary, trying to get along’.  You’re left in no doubt which one of the couple is indulging in false modesty.  Yet Fontaine isn’t so cool as to exclude audience sympathy with Eve and what she’s bound in due course to learn about her husband.  Ida Lupino’s Phyllis is impressively complex.  In one of their early conversations, Phyl, a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, tells Harry about her lost love, an American soldier with the occupation forces in Germany who sent her a ‘Dear Phyllis’ letter (‘I lost out to a little Fräulein’).  Next to the immaculate Eve, Phyl is relatively earthy but Lupino, without self-admiration, gives this unsentimental lonelyheart a poignant vulnerability.  In the hands of the reliable Edmund Gwenn, Mr Jordan’s strenuous diligence feels authentic.

    The Bigamist has plenty of real-life marital and movie references.  Collier Young, who wrote the screenplay, and Ida Lupino divorced in 1951; the following year, Young married Joan Fontaine.  Salesman Harry Graham falls for a woman who shares a forename with the Barbara Stanwyck character that led a different kind of salesman astray in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).  Harry and Phyllis first meet on a Beverly Hills bus tour that takes in the homes of Hollywood stars including Stanwyck and Edmund Gwenn (there’s even mention of Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which gave Gwenn his best-known role and landed him an Oscar).  These self-references aren’t smug, though, and they don’t limit the film’s serious dramatic purpose.  Some serve to point up differences between The Bigamist and its referents that puncture notions of a juicy movie à clef.  After her divorce from Young and his marriage to Fontaine, Lupino remained friends with them both.  Unlike Stanwyck’s Phyllis Didrikson, Phyllis Martin is decidedly not a femme fatale.

    Ida Lupino had also broken new ground in The Hitch-Hiker as the first female director of a film noir.  The result was a tense thriller and no mean achievement but The Bigamist has more layers.  Jordan leaves Harry’s LA home without calling the police.  Harry nevertheless confesses to both his wives.  In the climactic courtroom scene the judge (John Maxwell) concludes that:

    ‘If Harry Graham had taken Phyllis Martin as his mistress some people would have winked an eye and turned their head.  But because he gave her and the child she bore him his name and an honorable place in the community he must be utterly destroyed.  Now, I don’t deny that the defendant should be punished but I do believe that in this case punishment might well be tempered with mercy. … When a man, even with the best intentions, breaks the moral laws we live by, we really don’t need man-made laws to punish him.  He’ll find out that the penalty of the court is always the smallest punishment …’

    The judge’s words make baldly explicit the moral issues of the story that Lupino has told but this finale is very well played by all concerned.  The physical attitudes of the three main characters, and the looks that they exchange in court, sustain The Bigamist’s emotional complexity to what can meaningfully be called the bitter end.

    9 August 2023

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