Some movies speak loudly and carry a big cultural-impact stick. In the ’70s, for example: the first “Godfather” film, the second, even better one, or even bigger, “Jaws.” And “Star Wars.” They have stuck around as something more than hit movies.
The 1970s American cinema also gave us a fine, fat fistful of more modestly scaled triumphs, street-level classics a little lower to the ground. Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976) were two, certainly, though already we’re in slippery territory there for “modest,” given how “Taxi Driver” has been parodied, quoted, memed and misinterpreted into a kind of ridiculous superstardom, relentlessly.
“Dog Day Afternoon” is turning 50. And it’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” the 1975 Sidney Lumet picture about an attempted Brooklyn, New York, bank robbery and the relatively brief hostage scenario that grew out of it, that we are here to praise today.
It’s one of those street-level classics. Sneaky great. And it still plays like gangbusters with an audience, which is a strange thing to say about a film so confidently devoted to its many, lengthy scenes of doubt, quiet and private but overheard conversations at the edge of despair.
Seeing it again recently, with an audience of 150 college students wrapped up in it, but good, took me back to seeing “Dog Day Afternoon” when I was a high school sophomore. Seeing it again also made me realize how it speaks directly to the paradoxical genre broadly described as “true crime” films. Why a paradox? Because true crime has become a genre both emaciated and blobby, too often settling for cheap dread and cheap shots taken by filmmakers who can’t shoot straight.
“Dog Day Afternoon” is based on a true story of one of the more inept bank robberies of its century. Al Pacino, three years after “The Godfather” and two years after his first Lumet collaboration with the 1973 film “Serpico,” plays Sonny Wortzik, beleaguerment personified. Sonny and Sal, his hangdog sphinx of an accomplice played by John Cazale, start out with a third man who flees very early in the picture, well before Sonny learns the Brooklyn bank branch isn’t holding much money to steal. The cops are onto them almost from the start. The employees they’re holding hostage are a very judge-y group, full of opinions regarding Sonny’s maladroit planning and execution of the heist.
Screenwriter Frank Pierson won an Oscar for his docudramatic treatment of the real 1972 robbery. It’s a fantastic showcase for Pacino at a particular moment in his stardom, when an actor’s technique, nerve, sensitivity and reflection under Lumet’s direction could work wonders.
And make a lot of money. “Dog Day Afternoon” was, by mid-’70s studio standards, a nice low-to-medium-budget proposition, with a $1.8 million production budget, or a little under $11 million in 2025 dollars. Its $50 million gross translates to nearly $300 million today.
Its best-known scene will always be Sonny, out on the sidewalk, sweating, working the crowd, thinking through his options and pushing back on the ever-growing police presence, with his cries of “Attica! Attica!” (15 in all, plus a “Remember Attica?” for good measure). That was an improv cooked up in the three-week pre-production rehearsal, one of many interpolated while the cameras rolled.
That scene is also misleading. Yes, “Dog Day Afternoon,” seen 50 years ago or seen tomorrow, makes room for plenty of amateur showbiz and histrionics, because that’s how those hours felt to many who were there. Pacino’s happy to deliver the fireworks.
But the movie is also full, wonderfully full, of patient, easeful, observational passages of time killed, plans hatched, bits and pieces of Sonny and Sal’s interactions with each other or with the tellers. Midway through, Sonny’s hectic double life reveals itself: He has a wife and two kids (somewhat cruelly caricatured) and also a legal marriage to his male lover (Chris Sarandon, Oscar nominee). It is for this man, Leon, that Sonny is trying to steal a few thousand dollars to cover Leon’s gender reassignment surgery, then commonly called a sex-change operation.
Up until “Dog Day Afternoon,” the Hollywood movies I’d seen taught me and millions of other young moviegoers that gay or bisexual or cross-dressing or trans characters were there on screen, if they were there at all, to be humiliated or killed. Or both. Here, it was different: Without grinding to a halt to become an earnest message movie, Lumet and his cast treated Sonny and most every supporting character as individual parts of a human comedy that turns into a human-scaled tragedy.
Last month at the University of Illinois Spurlock Museum’s auditorium, as part of the College of Media Ebert Fellowship, this year’s Ebert Fellows and I introduced a “Dog Day Afternoon” screening. When the lights dimmed, I got a little nervous. Would the movie seem, I don’t know, slow, dated, “of its time” or whatever to a crowd of late-teen and 20-something students, most seeing it for the first time?
Well. It killed. They laughed when the behavior was funny but real (which is often), they leaned in, quietly, not a cellphone texting session in sight, when things got tough for Sonny and Sal, and when Sonny and Leon share their long farewell phone call.
It worked, period, because it wasn’t really a period picture. It was simply a film taking place in a specific time, but as a story told with such care and unfussy interest in everyone on screen, it couldn’t lose. Fifty years later, it couldn’t lose.
We can get it back, but what we’ve lost, I think, in those 50 years is simple: The interest or the habit or the skill of taking time in a two-hour true-crime saga to get to know the people. And to treat them as people, not characters or caricatures.
What I saw and heard in that U of I “Dog Day Afternoon” screening was authentic enthusiasm for a modest classic’s quality and rhythms. It will always be one of the great New York City movies. You can stream it for cheap, all over the place online.
Seeing it again is like seeing an old friend, as vital and stimulating as ever.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
