Dog Day Afternoon (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Sidney Lumet
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Al Pacino, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, John Cazale, Sully BoyarDirector: Sidney Lumet
Brand: Warner Brothers
Writer: Frank Pierson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 124 minutes
Published: 2006-02-01
DVD Release Date: 2006-02-28
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Dog Day Afternoon (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: "Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica!"
Summary: 5 Stars
The blackest of black comedy-dramas, DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975) is the last of the great performances of Al Pacino's early career. These tour-de-force performances include THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART TWO (both of which co-starred his co-star here, John Cazale), and SERPICO. After DOG DAY AFTERNOON Pacino returned to the stage for a time.
This story of a bank robbery gone bizarrely wrong is based on a true 1972 occurrence in Brooklyn, New York. Sonny Wortzik (Pacino) convinces his friend Sal (Cazale) to help him rob a bank. The motive for the robbery is oddly altruistic, as it transpires that Sonny is a married, closeted gay man, also married to Leon (Chris Sarandon) who needs money for his sex reassignment surgery.
The actual robbery, which should have taken five minutes, stretches into a fourteen hour hostage standoff as the incompetent Sonny loses control of the environment in and around the bank and the incompetent police on the scene fail to assert control. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the crime scene soon becomes the preserve of the tabloid media and a participatory crowd of people in the street. Neither Sonny nor Sal qualify as particularly cold-blooded, and in fact, the hostages appear to be having a fairly good time, and become friendly with their captors, waving enthusiastically at the cameras and refusing to leave the bank when chances occur.
Besides being Pacino's early last hurrah, DOG DAY AFTERNOON is also the last in a long line of frankly antiestablishment films produced by the Hollywood mainstream in the late 1960s and early 1970s, films like BONNIE AND CLYDE, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, LITTLE BIG MAN, and THE GRADUATE. The NYPD is presented as chaotic, disorganized, and bloodthirsty. Sonny and Sal become dark folk heroes as they win over the huge crowd of spectators. Sonny's leading the crowd in chanting, "Attica! Attica!" (Attica prison in Upstate New York was the site of a 1972 prison riot which was put down with a brutal loss of life) is considered one of the greatest moments in movie history.
Made at the nadir of American self-respect (the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era), DOG DAY AFTERNOON doesn't excuse the crime it portrays, but it does raise some ethical questions by humanizing the perpetrators as antiheroes. Sonny turns his empty pockets inside out while addressing the crowd about his struggle to make a living; the cops are hooted and hissed continually; Sonny and Leon's relationship is portrayed as outrageous only by the media circus within the film, not by the filmmakers themselves (historically speaking, this early Seventies liberalism was about to go into societal eclipse just as DOG DAY AFTERNOON was released), and the only real violence in DOG DAY AFTERNOON is perpetrated by the authorities.
Throughout it all, Pacino shines as the emotionally conflicted, uncertain, overwhelmed, and desperate Sonny. Leading a cheering crowd one moment, he is frozen into immobility the next. In trying to cope with the helpless people around him, Sonny screams, shouts, sinks into despondency, and becomes grandiose by turns. He is shown as marginally effective only in relation to the utterly ineffective people in his life, people he seems to unerringly gravitate toward (including Sal, who becomes more and more befuddled as the film progresses, Angela, his wife, who becomes hysterical because she can't find a babysitter in the midst of this madness, and Leon, who criticizes Sonny self-indulgently over his negativity and fear of death, never considering that Sonny is facing a firing squad of hundreds on this brutally hot summer afternoon).
In so many ways, DOG DAY AFTERNOON is a summation of its time, an era of cynicism, failure, fear, distrust of authority, and economic, moral and ethical impoverishment, thirty years on not unlike our own.
Summary of Dog Day Afternoon (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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