Dog Day Afternoon

This 1975 movie is based on the real events surrounding a bank robbery in August, 1972 in Brooklyn. Al Pacino and John Cazale play Sonny and Sal two losers attempting to commit the robbery. It is a comedy of errors from the beginning. Their third accomplice quits just as the robbery starts so that are forced to let him leave just after they have taken control of the bank. This leaves us with the scene of Sonny letting him out of the bank whose doors have been locked and then getting him to leave the keys to the getaway car.

Sonny has worked at banks before so he knows some of the tricks that might be attempted to foil the robbery, unfortunately he has never committed a robbery before and his inexperience clearly manifests itself. The bank had a deposit pickup shortly before his arrival, he had been counting on a drop off, and this leaves him with just over $1000 cash. He decides to steal the travelers checks but then to not allow these to be traced he decides to burn the register in a trash can. This causes smoke to billow inside the building and alerts a neighborhood barber to call the police.

From there Sonny has to negotiate his way out. This character is one of Pacino's best. He is intensely, if not likaable, at least sympathetic. This was not what he wanted and he clearly did not really understnad the ramifications.

We later learn that one of the motives for the robbery was to gain money so that his male lover, or wife as he calls him, named Leon needs a sex change operation. Sonny is also married to a woman and has two kids. Surely Sonny has alot on his plate. When the movie was released Sonny was an antihero as he raged about Attica and garnered the support of raucous crowds behind the police barricades.

John Cazale plays Sal as an understated almost mute man who lets Sonny do the leading, in fact you get the sense that he has been led into this by nothing more than the volume of Sonny's personality. Sal is a religeois man who considers his body a temple and chastizes one of the hostages from smoking as " your body is a temple." This is especially powerful as we know that Cazale died less than five years later of mestatsized lung cancer.

Charles Durning plays the police detective negotiating with Sal and he is wonderful in this role, perhaps epitomizing by trying to hold the crime scene together how crazy the whole city of New York was in that turbulent time.

This is a period peice, certainly without knowledge of how crazy the seventies were, especially in New York City, the movie loses some of its appeal but taken and understood with the right backdrop this movie is powerful and the ending cannot help but leave one a little shook.

A movie whose characters stay with you, considered one of recently passed director Sidney Lumet's best.