This post is part of a series called "7 Days in the 70's", seven important 1970 films over the course of a week. Click Dog Day Afternoon (1975): Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning and Chris Sarandon. Directed by Sidney Lumet, Screenplay by Frank Pierson, based on an article by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore.
Get the film at Amazon: Dog Day Afternoon
Before the age when all movies needed a deafening wall-to-wall music soundtrack, there were movies like “Dog Day Afternoon”, which, apart from the opening title track (”Amoreena” by Elton John) which fades into a car radio as the story begins, there isn’t a single note of music for the rest of the film. The story is left to the script, and the director and the performers.
Based on the real-life story of John Wojtowicz, Al Pacino, who’d become a huge boxoffice star after “The Godfather”, its sequel, and “Serpico”, plays Sonny Wortzik, who attempts a very misguided bank robbery which ends in a 12-hour siege and media sideshow.
The script, by Frank Pierson, is incredibly simple, taking place mainly inside the bank and its surrounding buildings, but once the film is over, you feel you have been through a massive ordeal. It’s not the the film is an ordeal, it’s a pleasure to watch, and it’s not that it’s all gloomy and tense, more than anything, the film plays as a tragic-comedy with serious actors in a very serious situation than anything else. What director Sidney Lumet did was to rehearse and improvise with the actors, using the script as a backbone, then had Pierson incorporate what worked into the final version. The result is so realistic it comes off in parts like a documentary.
The thing that made films shine in the seventies, as far as I’m concerned, is that writers and directors and actors were not afraid to make a loser or an outcast the main character — or hero — of a story. This film is a perfect case in point. There is no reason, going into this film, that you should like or side with Pacino’s character, he’s a loser who’s resorted to robbing a bank and can’t even do that right, but, over the course of the film, you grow to empathize with him, much in the same manner the hostages do in the film.
The amazing thing about Pacino, and something that most of the world knows already from his long career, is that, a few minutes after the start of each performance, you don’t see Al Pacino “the star” anymore, just whatever character he is playing. Lumet (”The Hill”, “The Anderson Tapes”, “Serpico”, “Network”, “The Verdict” and many, many more) has always been wise with his actors, and has just let them do what they were hired to do and they respect him for it.
The ending, is gut-wrenching and shows very clearly the fickle nature of everyday relationships (even if that relationship is the one between a hostage and a gunman). Lumet knows how to capture this and does it in merely a couple of shots, he doesn’t slam you over the head with it the way filmmakers or screenwriters are taught today, making films, primarily, for an audience who are distracted by other things while watching.
I love this movie. It’s definitely in my top ten, and not because the camera flies around all over the place or because the cinematography matches some painting that someone did a hundred years ago. It is what it is: a couple of guys trying to rob a bank with unfortunate results. I know it doesn’t sound like a load of yucks, but I urge you to see it if you haven’t already and quick, before someone does a remake!
Original Trailer:
Seen “Dog Day Afternoon”? Want to comment? Leave some words below…
[No related posts]
Leave a Comment or Reply