Animal Attraction: Dog Day Afternoon

We’re fast approaching the time of year when the Library of Congress announces the new inductees for its National Film Registry, honoring movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. I’ve just watched a 1975 film that made the list back in 2009. Dog Day Afternoon can be said to have historical significance, because it’s based on an actual true-crime incident that was covered in Life magazine in 1972. But with the great Sidney Lumet at the helm, it’s also an aesthetic marvel.

 Lumet’s long film career began in 1957, with the tightly focused, highly suspenseful jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. Lunet directed several films based on classic American plays, including A View from the Bridge and Long Day’s Journey into Night (a powerful version of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical stage production). There were lighter works too (he put on screen The Wiz, the “ghetto” version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a huge Broadway hit), but he was perhaps best known for crime thrillers, like Serpico and his very last project (in 2007), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  He was four times nominated for Best Director Oscars, but could never quite eke out a personal win. (He did receive a richly deserved honorary Oscar in 2004, seven years before his death at age 86.) His most honored film was probably Network, a cutting satire of the TV industry that was nominated for major 9 Oscars and won four, though Rocky took home the top prize. I personally have a special love for his late career film, Running on Empty (1988), the poignant story of a counterculture couple whose son (the late River Phoenix) tries to opt out of their nomadic lives as fugitives from the FBI. On that film, as often happened for Lumet, his writer and lead actor got nominated for Oscars even though he himself didn’t.

 Dog Day Afternoon is surely one of Lumet’s mid-career best, made just after Murder on the Orient Express and before Network. It’s the story of a bank robbery, but with a significant difference. In most bank heist films, going back to the very early days of cinema, there’s a lot of money at stake: the bad guys either get it or don’t. If they succeed in robbing the bank, they either get away or (more often) are foiled at the very last minute, thus proving that crime doesn’t pay. But Dog Day Afternoon is much more of a character study: at its center is a loser who’s desperately trying to untangle a messy domestic situation by funding his male lover’s sex change operation. His solution is to rob a Brooklyn bank, one that turns out to have virtually no cash on hand. As the tension and the temperature rise, Sonny tries to achieve his goals by taking a clutch of bank-tellers hostage: their emotions range from fear to anger to perverse amusement. There’s also another gunman on the scene, the eerily silent Sal (John Cazale), who seems violent enough to commit mayhem.

 The Brooklyn neighborhood re-created on film by Lumet becomes part of the action, as counterculture crowds sympathetic to the hapless Sonny gather in the street to heckle the swarming NYPD cops and straight-arrow FBI guys. Though movies are, of necessity, filmed out of sequence, the mood of this one is so well-sustained that we feel we are on the spot, watching it all unfold in real time as the weather gets hotter, Sonny gets sweatier (inside the bank, the air conditioning has been dismantled), and the possibility of bloodshed becomes more and more likely. 

 

The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

The Unsung Stuntman: Carl Ciarfalio Takes His Last Bow

  I don't normally re-post old Beverly in Movieland entries.  But I was so saddened to read about the death of ace stuntman (and very good guy) Carl Ciarfalio in November of this year that I decided to honor his memory by  repeating this profile from January 10, 2013. (You might remember Carl for pummeling Tom Cruise in a bare-knuckles boxing scene in Ron Howard's Far and Away--the rare on-screen fight that Cruise ever lost.)  

Now that the list of Oscar nominees is out, I’m pausing to acknowledge Hollywood’s forgotten men (and women). Stunt performers have been around since the movies began. But they rarely get the recognition they deserve. Take Harvey Parry, who used to stunt-double the great silent film star, Harold Lloyd. Parry’s contracts specified he could not admit to doubling for Lloyd until after Lloyd’s death. But wasn’t Lloyd -- an extremely athletic fellow -- capable of doing his own stuntwork? Modern-day stunt actor Carl Ciarfalio admits this was true, mostly. Lloyd in his prime was “much like today’s Tom Cruise. Tom does almost everything, but not everything.”

Carl Ciarfalio knows a great deal about stuntwork. He should, after 38 years in the business. You’ve seen him on-screen in major films like Fight Club, Mission Impossible III, and The Amazing Spider-Man. He’s got a Roger Corman connection too, having worn the “Thing” suit in Concorde’s underground hit, The Fantastic Four. It all began when he and a wrestling-team buddy auditioned for a stunt show at Knott’s Berry Farm. Knott’s was looking for big guys who could fall down and be funny. Carl, then digging ditches for a plumber, figured the Knott’s gig would make a great summer job, before he entered Cal State Fullerton. But “within a couple of months I had a cowboy hat and a gun and I was on stage and people were applauding and laughing, and I told my parents, ‘I’ll go back to school one day.’” Instead, of course, he ended up in the school of hard knocks.

A stuntman’s career requires training, as well as a serious approach to one’s craft. I told Carl I’d been on the set of New World’s Big Bad Mama when stuntmen performed a dangerous car flip. They walked away unhurt, then headed for the nearest bar. Carl agrees this often happens, especially on location, but “at the end of the day . . . I like to go home and take a shower and take a deep breath and think about what the day was about. Because you’re only as good as your last gag.”

In his off-hours, does he do crazy things for fun and recreation? “No, ma’am, I’m exactly the opposite of that. There’s a huge difference between thrillseekers and daredevils and professional stunt people. Professional stunt people need to have that A-type personality to be able to step off the cliff or light themselves on fire, but they also need to be able to do it in front of the camera -- hit their marks and then do it a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. So that makes it different than a daredevil who is trying to beat the odds. Scripted stunts, scripted action is much different than jumpin’ off the roof and hopin’ you make the pool.”

Now that he’s an elder statesman of sorts, Carl increasingly works as a stunt coordinator, facing the pressure of keeping his entire team safe from harm. One big challenge: “Low-budget films want it all, and have no money for anything.” In which case, he’ll demand script changes, because “no piece of film is worth an injury or a death.”

As one of the first governors representing stunt performers at the Television Academy, Carl has helped make sure stunt coordinators now receive Emmy recognition. Oscar, though, has yet to catch up. Given the current popularity of action films, he hopes this will soon change. After all, “a James Bond movie would be nothin’ if it was just walkin’ and talkin.’”

Hail and farewell, Carl!