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.