The Loving Spoonful wanted to point out that no matter how hot it gets in the summer in the city, at night it's a different world. But in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, the midday heat hasn't tempered, it has only built and as night falls, you know there's still one more moment of tragic action to come.

For Lumet, one of the finest dramatic chroniclers of New York in cinema history (Woody Allen and Billy Wilder can fight it out for the comedy crown), Dog Day Afternoon is a career high point. Between 1957 and 1988 (not so much his later work), Lumet made at least ten very good movies (from The Pawnbroker to Serpico to Twelve Angry Men to Network), but this is his masterpiece. Dog Day Afternoon earned its star, Al Pacino, his fourth Oscar nomination. And this side of Michael Corleone, this is his best performance. Outside of Fredo Corleone, this is John Cazale's best performance. Charles Durning and Chris Sarandon have never been better. And the film is written with wit and heart by Frank Pierson. And while I would be lying if I told you that his script here is better than his work on Cool Hand Luke, it's right up there on that level, which is pretty darned amazing. Dog Day Afternoon is a true classic.

And yet Pierson's script won the film's only Oscar (it had five other nominations). It should be noted that One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest swept the awards that year and it's tough to feel bad about that. You could also note that other films nominated for awards that year included Jaws, Nashville, Fellini's Amarcord, Barry Lyndon, Shampoo, Three Days of the Condor, and The Man Who Would Be King. My point in short? They don't make 'em like they used to and they also used to make 'em in greater quantity.

Dog Day Afternoon is the true story of Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) who robbed a bank in Brooklyn on a hot summer's day in 1972. After the police were notified, they held ten people hostage until their demands were met. Making things more complicated was the fact that Sonny was robbing the bank to help his "wife" Leon (Chris Sarandon) pay for a sex change operation. But basically, though, it's a simple story.

Reversing Hollywood convention, Dog Day Afternoon starts out loud, plays out its action and verbal fireworks in the first hour, and then settles into increasingly serious and increasingly quiet drama in its last half. The first forty minutes feature the attempted bank robbery, lots of gun waving, the introduction of Officer Moretti (Charles Durning), and the police build-up around the under siege bank. Most of the familiar images from the film, including Pacino strutting in front of the bank with his white flag cheerig the crowd on with "Attica! Attica! Attica!", come at the beginning. At the end, you get a lot of emotional conversations. Lumet and Pierson deserve credit for keeping the last hour as compelling as the first.

This is especially well handled by Lumet, who directs the film like two different men. The films half is all moving camera and "documentary" style. The camera zips up and down lines at the bank, paces around Pacino like a caged animal, and soars above the mess in a helicopter. The first half of the film is kinetic (aided by Dede Allen's masterful cutting), while the second half is cerebral. The camera slows down as the action slows down and scenes begin to elongate. Lumet encourages the intimacy with close-ups and tighter hand-held work.

Pacino's performance matches perfectly with Lumet's style. Unlike his amazingly internalized performances in the Godfather movies, Pacino's performance here is at its best when he's at his most physical. Pacino has his character's every motion and gesture down. He's a live-wire and he's contrasted with Cazale's Sal, who's so internatized as to be nearly catatonic. But in a chilling and still sympathetic way.

The film is a fascinating snapshot of American social politics in the early 1970s (Dog Day was made in 1975 and set in 1972). The greatest rise of the counterculture was already in the past, but the film examines whether the social movements of the late 1960s really changed anything at all. If the goal of the counterculture was to challenged the established institutions of American life, than it's pretty clear that nothing has changed. In Dog Day Afternoon, our villains aren't specific characters, they're evil faceless monoliths. For all of Officer Moretti's seemingly genuine interest in helping bring the crisis to a peaceful conclusion, he is just a small cog in the machine of the American justice system. The police and the FBI are an inhuman swarm around the bank. But the alternatives for Sonny are restricted. Set only a year after the Attica riots, Sonny correctly views the prisons as a system in which the guilty and innocent are punished equally. And Leon is a victim of the mental hospital which spends so much time drugging him up that they can't be bothered to help him.

Sonny is the post boy for the dissolution of America. A practicing Catholic who worked for Goldwater in 1964, Sonny also fought in Vietnam. He bought into the system totally, with a wife and two kids, but now he's trapped and unemployable. Of course he's also ghettoized to some degree by his sexuality. Still, he hoped for more from the America he came back to, but now the pressures are just too great and, as he frequently repeats, he's "dying here."

The bank and the hostages within present optimism in the film and the ability to change. Initially the bank is presented as the ultimate Conservative bastion. The tellers are all rigid, uptight, and eager to correct Sonny's grammer. But as the film ends, they've gotten to know the robbers and empathize with them and they laugh at their earlier nervousness around foul language. They've been changed.

The crowd, on the other hand, offers a negative critique of the so-called liberal revolutionaries on the late 60s. When Sonny is a political symbol, they embrace him. They join him in jeering the police and they make a hero of him. But as Sonny shifts into a social symbol, the true colors of the crowd come through. They mock him for his sexuality and they boo him for shunning his mother. Politically the crowd is liberal, but they still believe in certain values of heterosexual patriarchy and they still respect the family unit. Sonny can be a symbol for them when they think he's just a married man with kids, but when his life is revealed to be more complicated, they have trouble dealing with it. In the end, Sonny is only being cheered by a group of gay activists. There's no unity, only fractured America.

Even though most of the action in Dog Day Afternoon takes place on one block on one afternoon, it feels more expansive than that. It's got action, suspense, and a quirky love story and it just becomes deeper the more you look at it.

It should be noted that the DVD is a pretty mediocre transfer. The colors are a little muted and the source print still includes reel-change cigarette burns, which are annoying on a DVD. It's time for a special edition of this baby.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older