On its 50th anniversary, I’m officially proclaiming that there are few films better for understanding the reality of America today than Dog Day Afternoon. In Sidney Lumet’s ‘70s crime thriller classic, a young Al Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik (based on the real-life John Wojtowicz), a protagonist who’s basically the opposite of, say, Clint Eastwood. Where the Western lead is a mostly silent, confident and mysterious figure, Sonny is nervous, irrational and fueled entirely by his emotions. When he and his zombie-like counterpart, Sal (John Cazale, aka Freddo in The Godfather), take a savings bank and its small group of (mostly female) lenders hostage, it quickly hits us that, despite all his street-smarts, Vietnam War veteranhood and bravado, he really has no idea what he’s doing. And once the third robber quickly bails, the police, and then the FBI, come crashing in and seemingly all of New York rally outside, the sweaty, flustered Sonny is forced to witness all of his most intimate secrets – namely, the fact that the married father of three was robbing the bank to pay for his gay lover’s sex change operation – be revealed on national television. So does he end the film riding stoicly on horse back into the desert? I think you can guess.
Admittedly, this is not a situation most Americans, or really anyone, find themselves in often. Even Sonny and the FBI guys obviously have no idea what’s going on. Where the reality seeps out is in how the film depicts the media. The film is based on a real-life robbery, and even before the advent of social media, a bank robbery in the middle of New York quickly caught the attention of every cable news platform. Within minutes, a legion of cameras and mics are assembled around the bank and hundreds of enthralled on-lookers are fenced off outside. Those inside, the hostages and Sonny, have evolved from your average nobody one minute to national sensations in the next, having their lives and backstories broadcasted to millions of strangers – an eerie foreshadowing of what we witness today. Like most accidental celebrities, they love it. Suddenly, crisis has turned to celebration, and when it’s made apparent that Sonny has no intention of hurting them, they’re combing their hair for live interviews, eating pizza and fantasising about a holiday to Algeria. One poignant scene comes mid-way when the bank’s head teller is outside with Sonny, and when the cops tell her to run, she defiantly proclaims: ‘my place is with my girls.’ What she really means is: her place is on TV.
Heist films are nothing new, and Dog Day Afternoon isn’t exempt from the genre’s clichés: on top of the screwball, Three Stooges-esque shenanigans of the robbers, there’s quite literally an Irish cop who yells: ‘come on out, Sonny, and no one’s gonna get hurt,’ a line so infamous in the gangster films of pre-Hays Code Hollywood it can’t possibly be a coincidence. Especially because Dog Day Afternoon so intimately destronstructs America’s relationship with media and, by extension, itself.
First there’s Sonny. Given how ludicrous and uncontrollable his heist has become, when he starts having every cable news channel desperate for his attention, and an army of New Yorkers outside chanting his name, we see a gear switch in his head: the moment he stops seeing reality – shaking, stammering and pacing paranoidly around the bank – and starts seeing himself in the vein of those charming, confident, gunslingling Hollywood heroes – the exact opposite of who he really is. He marches outside, close enough to the door, and dictates the FBI around like a classroom of kids, before pompously gesturing to the crowd: ‘ATTICA! ATTICA!’ (a reference to the ‘71 prison riots in New York). Slowly, the cold reality of what’s going on creeps back in, once his family and lover are turbulently thrown into the mix – the latter causes most of NYC to turn against him but in the process, makes him a gay rights icon as well.
This is one area where the film deviates cleverly from genre conventions: all of the stress and tension is coming, not from the heist itself (Will they free the hostages? Will the cops save the day?) from Sonny himself. Like the best New York films (Mean Streets, Do The Right Thing), there’s very little spectacle or complex plotting – it’s all character-driven. Dare I say, while not the best of these films – the story gets fairly repetitive at times and twenty minutes could easily be cut – Dog Day Afternoon is the ultimate New York flick or, alternatively, the ultimate ‘Eastern’.
Why? Simply because of how anti-Hollywood the whole thing is. Director Sidney Lumet (who most will know for 12 Angry Men) presents the film in an un-stylised, TV documentary manner. There are no dollies or montages or crash zooms or grandiose musical ballads. The women here aren’t glamorously dressed and shown in technicolour on vaseline-tinted lenses. Instead, we have mundane, average-looking people, trapped in a sterile bank with dull natural lighting. The bank set is a real location, with a soundscape full of analogue telephones, echoed footsteps and office machinery and wasn’t altered or expanded, meaning the crew wore roller-skates to make the camera as camouflaged as possible. Inspired by Italian neorealism (a subversive post-WW2 film movement that emphasised naturalistic shooting, non-actors and the struggles of the poor), Lumet has crafted one of the most authentic studies of American reality to date.
What Lumet understands so well, and what these characters and arguably us as the audience do not, is that Hollywood is fake. What you see on screen – the glitz, the glamour, the heroism and fated moral justice – is far divorced from real-life. Sonny’s hostages think they’re Marilyn Monroe. Sonny thinks he’s John Wayne. And the classical Westerns (those of John Ford and Howard Hawks) idealise the Wild West, glossing over the violence and persecution it wrought; instead painting America as an imperfect nation, but one striving ardently towards equality. A nation where anyone, regardless of their background, can succeed. So when the likes of Sergio Leone and Corbucci took their own spin on the Western, in part to criticise and parody this delusion, how did Hollywood react? They laughed them off as nothing more than cheap rip-off ‘Spaghetti’ Westerns (Spanish filmmakers made ‘Paella’ Westerns, Japanese filmmakers made ‘Sushi’ Westerns).
The revisionist Western filmmakers, like the neorealists, were Italian. And while Hollywood shoved a homogenised image of the US on the cinemas and TV screens of American households, the reality is that European immigrants – Italians, Irish, Jews – were still very much defined and prejudiced by their ethnic identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than New York, where, even going into the 70s, neighbourhoods were ethnically divided (the great NYC films reflect this: Mean Streets is set in Little Italy, DTRT in the predominantly-Black Harlem district.) Interestingly, Hollywood is not where American cinema was birthed.
Only from around the 30s did LA become the cinematic capital of the US and, soon after, the world. New York was where the first American films were made, but the men behind the cameras were mostly Europeans and mostly Eastern refugees. Film was the only industry they were welcome, or rather allowed, into, and when American filmmakers migrated to California, still in a country where they were barred from complete assimilation into society, they created a world – Hollywood – where everyone was accepted. Of course, that world was just that: a creation, and when filmmakers like Scorsese, Lee and Lumet, who all grew up in the ethnic streets of NYC (Lumet was Jewish) and absorbed films from both Hollywood and Europe, they told stories that could only be told in New York. For God’s sake, what other mainstream film in the 70s had a gay protagonist with a transgender lover?
What sets Lumet, and Dog Day Afternoon, apart from the works of Scorsese and Lee is that the latter directors tell their stories cinematically as well, just in a different way. Their characters and their relationships feel very real, effectively capturing the emotional intensity of these people’s lives, and these stories certainly give the impression that they’re based on real experience, but with all their French New Wave-influenced filmmaking and stylised drama, we can never accept that this is reality. De Niro in Taxi Driver delivers a gritty, captivating, realistic performance of mental illness and depravity, but when the camera is constantly dollying in on his sadistically smiling countenance, and the film quick-cuts in the same scene, we feel the presence of the behind-the-scenes set. In Dog Day Afternoon, the only presence we feel is Pacino’s, with his truly revolutionary performance unfolding in a world devoid of glitz and glamour and film fakery and populated by millions of people craving it.
How does it get more real than that?
4/5
Image Credits – TheMovieDB
