A retrospective of six titles from the filmography of Sidney Lumet can be found in this year’s selection of TIFF. In „Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), the filmmakers recorded Al Pacino’s transformation from a petty thief into a televisual Messiah. 

The montage that opens the film, which collocates a series of documentary vignettes of New York, already sets the tone: the city lies suspended in a place somewhere between perpetual damnation and endless possibilities, between the garbage and the horizon. This air of degenerate urbanism seems to have also birthed the three co-authors of the armed robbery at the heart of the affair, these door-to-door neighbors of deranged Scorsesean heroes such as Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Rupert Pupkin (The King of Comedy) and other progeny of the long night that was the Seventies. Dog Day Afternoon is a film in which things initially move at an accelerated, yet syncopated pace – the operation keeps on getting stuck, and the fact that the youngest of the robbers (a scared kid) takes a run for it and escapes the bank from the very get-go is the very least of problems –, only for things to end up winding down, to a slow and sticky flow. It takes less than twenty minutes for us to understand that the plan is destined to fail; the endless comedy of an event that refuses to unwind is all that remains.

Dog Day Afternoon is the result of a social climate dominated by tension and paranoia, wherein the typical American optimism starts to give way to a sense of general farce. It’s no wonder that, at the end of this long siege at the bank, our protagonists will end up drowning in a sea of confusion: they’re neither Robin Hood-esque heroes animated by social aims, nor are they bandits that jumped out of some immoral western flick, or lunatics with no sense of reality whatsoever, or, finally, some show-offs that suffer from post-traumatic stress – they’re a tiny little bit of everything. The most interesting sequence of the film is that in which Sonny, the duo’s informal leader, steps outside on the sidewalk, only for him to discover that the area is infested with armed policemen. It’s the moment in which he finds a seemingly untapped energy within himself, as he starts to vividly admonish them for surrounding him much too closely or yelling at them to holster their weapons. The man begins to fully transform – in Pacino’s all-time great performance – from the naive dope that we had just seen, to an imposing figure that begs for respect, and who cultivates an assured discourse without stuttering, as he incorporates his calls to “Put your guns down!” into true performance, melodic and rhythmic. 

Without taking its intuitions to their conclusions (for that, one needs the artistic intelligence of Scorsese), the film is already treading with one foot onto Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, and with another into McLuhan’s global village. Aware that his activity as a robber is only half-successful, Sonny reconverts into a media phenom, discovering an adept ally in the masses of people on the sidelines that are thirsty for spectacle, the only one capable of tipping the scales in the era of mass communication: suddenly, classical forms of justice see themselves pitted against media lynchings. In his quest of grabbing some easy cash, Sonny ends up profiting from the live transmission, enjoying his passing moment of glory to the same degree to which he is voluptuously delivering himself – body and soul – to the televisual dissection. 

Here is the point where Dog Day Afternoon proves to be most inciting: turning Sonny into a pawn that is increasingly savory in the virtual plain of television the more he becomes unpredictable in the real one, the film opens a breach that is not at all lacking in tragedy, where the scientist turns into his lab rat – and vice-versa. Not even the character’s uncertain sexuality – a family dad, but also the husband of a man who wants to become a woman – cannot escape the fetid mill of TV: in a sample of visionary thought, the film gives credit to this individual who understands the idea that everything is allowed on screen and does so on the go, and so, until the evening dawn’s, the flamboyance of the afternoon gives way to a perfect indifference towards anything that the journalists might come up with.

There is a world of difference between this figure that has already known the wear and tear of the media circus, and Sal (John Cazale), his still-innocent partner in crime. After all, the limit of the film has to do with its inability to picture this relation in any other way than as an opposition that is much too rigorous, with a Sonny that is turned into walking clickbait (his mother, his husband, his wife – all of them end up in the limelight) and a Sal that is trapped in an all-too-rigid morality. It’s not by chance that the only moment in which this silent man and mysterious man revolts is when he asks an FBI chief to call the television station and amend the information that he would also be a homosexual – a wish that Sonny quickly contradicts by saying that “it doesn’t matter anyway”. Between ego trip and total effacement in the name of a greater cause, this film knows no middle ground.

There is something strange about all of these films that, beyond the immediate viewing experience, have endured throughout time as symbols, and only seem to still matter today through what they once had to say – and not in the way they said it. Everyone understood that Dog Day Afternoon anticipated the thinning of reality that happened in the eighties, and quite brilliantly so, along with the proliferation of screens that multiply said reality to the same degree that they fragment it – but who can still recall the film’s dead spots or the sensation that Lumet only nails the tempo sometimes, intermittently, and that it often drags on uselessly? It’s increasingly clear that, in its status as an action movie, Dog Day Afternoon would have needed the support of a firmer directorial hand, one that would be less tone-deaf – but the film’s „documentary” sparks transform it into a sort of airtight time capsule. At one point, Cazale tells one of the hostages that he doesn’t smoke, because he’s afraid of getting cancer. A premonitory remark on from this prematurely gone actor, which eerily calls to mind the hasty ending of the crepuscular dream that was the New Hollywood Cinema.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.