DOG DAY AFTERNOON
Dir. Sidney Lumet
1975

Watching Dog Day Afternoon again last summer, I’d genuinely forgotten how it ended. I sat in total suspense for the last twenty minutes, trying to rack my brain and remind myself where it was going. I didn’t figure it out, and the film broke my heart all over again. Of course, Dog Day Afternoon is based on the true story of Sonny Wojtowicz’s hostage-fraternization bank robbery, so knowing the ending can hardly be considered a spoiler, but I really sat there pinching myself and hoping it was gonna turn out all right for Sonny and Sal.

In the first street scenes, where Pacino’s Sonny loses the oversized suitcoat and starts feeling himself, he’s as hot as anyone has ever been on screen. The film is filled to the brim with great performances (Cazale and Sarandon, obviously, but also Durning, Allen, Kane) but it all must rest on Pacino’s shoulders, and it’s perfection. It is, to be clear, a busy ass performance – the theatrics are extremely heightened, and largely the world has risen to match those theatrics. But it is also a sensitive one, where he really takes seriously the mania and the affection Sonny has for the people in his life.

We never see Sonny’s worst side. Leon and Grace both allude to a dangerous, violent darkness (one Grace sees as impossibly as we do, one Leon knows all too well.) Instead we see the charismatic people pleaser compromising constantly. Acquiescence is Sonny’s fatal flaw – as he repeatedly says, he’s “under so many pressures,” and he can’t begin to know who to disappoint until his mother shows up.

All this is drenched in Lumet’s golden cinema. Incredible crowd work, hysterical sight gags (the fifth time a police bus arrived, people were howling. The pizzas!) So many great moments for all the women in the bank to shine in a panning shot or background work. Cazale’s deadpan is so fun. The fact that this is all built around such a wonderful character study – it’s something that makes perfect sense from the director of 12 Angry Men, creating this ecosystem of strong characters around one cult of personality.

Dog Day Afternoon is one of the most famous and beloved films I’m writing about this month, considered both a landmark of anti-authoritarianism and of on-screen queer representation. Reading quotes about its production, you can sense quite a bit of consternation on the behalf of the cast and their representation about the queer aspect of the film, some thoughtful and effective and some retrograde and offensive. The result of those tensions is a film that feels more like it’s judging no one too harshly and giving no one a total pass. That tension feeds directly back into the film, a hot summer’s day boiling over, no “cooler heads” to prevail in sight.