IMDb Top 250: #221 – Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Dog Day After
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250 films, 250 reviews. This is a pretty crazy idea, but who doesn’t love a challenge? Here at Cultured Vultures we’ll be counting down the IMDb Top 250 with a review for each from one of our dedicated film writers. Everything from Goodfellas to Casablanca will be covered over the next year or so for you film lovers to enjoy. You can’t say we don’t spoil you, you lovely lot. – Ashley, Project Lead

In 1972, a bank in Brooklyn was subjected to a 14-hour stand-off between a sizeable chunk of the NYPD, the FBI, and Vietnam veteran John Wojtowicz, who was holed up inside with his partner, Sal Naturale, and seven hostages. Over the course of the ordeal, both robbers inadvertently became pseudo-celebrities, as more and more details of their motivation for the caper came to light. It didn’t end particularly well for anyone, but it birthed a story so fascinating that it caught the interest of one of the greatest film directors of all time – Sidney Lumet.

Much of the basis for the film was taken from an article published in Life Magazine shortly after the event itself, but the film didn’t come out until 1975. Far from being a stoic recounting of a robbery gone awry, Dog Day Afternoon is one of the most riveting, thought provoking crime films ever made, and it represents one of Al Pacino’s finest performances. He and Lumet had already partnered up on Serpico, but for my money, this is a stronger outing for them both. He plays John, here renamed to Sonny, with a kind of nervous, teetering charisma that makes you almost helpless to warm to him. Right at the beginning of the film Sonny and Sal’s third counterpart opts out of the job just as it’s getting started, and Sonny makes absolutely certain that he gets out of the bank and away safely.

It’s that kind of conflict that resonates through the entire film. Sonny and Sal are holding people hostage, they threaten to start killing them more than once, but the gathering crowd outside the bank are uproariously supportive of him, especially given the overwhelming anti-war sentiment at the time. At one stage Sonny marches up and down the street in front of the bank, surrounded by armed cops and repeatedly chants ‘Attica!’, whipping the crowd up into an increasingly greater storm with each repetition. Attica refers to the brutal and polarising riots that took place in the eponymous prison in 1971.

Sonny doesn’t just prevail with the mob though, the hostages even begin to warm to him after a while. Even as negotations intensify and the overwhelming discomfort of being stuck in an un-air conditioned building for hours on starts to set in, many of them seem to warm to him. Much of the dialogue in the film was workshopped and improvised at Lumet’s insistence, and it comes across beautifully. Characters stumble over lines, contradict themselves and backtrack and the connections developed between them feel so real and changeable for it. Sonny’s relationship with the manager is particularly fascinating. The hostages have a much harder time warming to Sal, the unpredictable element, played to eerie, darkly comedic effect by the late, great John Cazale.

The genius of Dog Day Afternoon is in the blunt, directness of it. The film is almost utterly devoid of music, none of the characters ever soliloquise or discuss their past lives in detail, we just have to take them as they are, all of the internal exploration is left for after the credits have rolled and the film is still rattling around inside your head. In his book, Making Movies, Lumet states that he kept all of his films sharply focused on their fundamental, guiding idea, from scripting to shooting to editing. For Dog Day Afternoon the idea was this – “Freaks are not the freaks we think they are. We are much more connected to the most outrageous behaviour than we know or admit.”. Sonny and Sal are anomalies, they are abnormal, but at their core, they have the same wants and needs as anyone else. The film shows other people reflecting in their mirror, some respond with support, others with ridicule, others with hatred, and as an audience, we’re left to decide what stands out.

Note: the IMDb Top 250 Cultured Vultures are using is based on the standings from the 16th of November. Inconsistencies may apply.

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