Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

starring Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning

directed by Sidney Lumet

125 minutes

Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) and Sal Naturile (John Cazale) attempt to rob a bank in Brooklyn, NY on Aug 22, 1972. Everything does not go according to plan. They had a third accomplice but he chickened out just as the heist was beginning and left. The bank had considerably less money than Sonny and Sal expected it to have. The police arrived on the scene sooner than Sonny and Sal expected them.

Sonny and Sal are left in the bank with several hostages, all of them bank employees and most of them tellers. Over the course of the rest of the day Sonny tries to negotiate a way out of their predicament. He deals first with Sergeant Moretti (Charles Durning) and then with FBI Special Agent Sheldon.

It comes out during the standoff between the bank robbers and the police that Sonny is gay. Complicating things further is the the fact that Sonny is married to Angie, a woman, and has two children with her. He robbed the bank in part because he was hoping to get enough money to pay for a sex change operation for Leon, with whom he is in love.

Sonny's negotiations with the FBI finally yield the concessions he was looking for but everything does not work out in Sonny's and Sal's favor in the end.

Thoughts

This was my first time watching Dog Day Afternoon. I was aware of it for years. The movie was based on actual events. The names of some of the characters were changed.

There are at least three actors in supporting roles that I recognized from other movie and television shows: Carol Kane (Jenny, one of the hostages) and Lance Henriksen (FBI Special Agent Murphy), Dominic Chianese (Sonny's father). Additionally, Leon was played by Chris Sarandon who I did not recognize even though I thought he looked familiar. Sarandon's best known role is perhaps as Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride. 

John Cazale was only in five movies before he died in 1978, at the age of 42. All five of those movies were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. This was the only one of those five films that I had not seen prior to today.

Dog Day Afternoon was nominated for five Academy Awards in addition to being nominated for Best Picture. Sidney Lumet was nominated for Best Director, Al Pacino was nominated for Best Actor, Chris Sarandon was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, Frank Pierson (writer) was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and Dede Allen (editor) was nominated for Best Film Editing. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest swept all the major awards at the Academy Awards that year. Frank Pierson was the only one of the Academy Award nominees from Dog Afternoon to win.

This movie, on some levels, seems a little much but the performances by the lead actors and the rest of the cast make it a very tense watch. It feels as though things could go sideways very easily at several points during the movie. The fact that the three leads play their roles as if they understand the gravity of the situation really made the situation feel real.

This is an excellent movie and well worth my time. It did not disappoint me in the least bit. I wasn't able to figure it all out before the movie ended but I also wasn't completely taken by surprise by the ending.