Sidney Lumet  (1975)

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

Take 1

On August 22^nd 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.