Sidney Lumet's heat-soaked Brooklyn bank robbery. Al Pacino's best performance, in the same year as The Godfather Part II.
Brooklyn, the afternoon of August 22, 1972. Sonny Wortzik and Sal Naturile attempt to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank branch on Avenue P. The robbery goes wrong within minutes — the vault is almost empty, the police arrive too fast, and the two robbers find themselves with a building full of bank employees as hostages and a growing crowd outside on the Brooklyn street.
The siege lasts approximately fourteen hours. The film follows Sonny across that time — his negotiations with the police, his interviews with the local TV news crew that arrives to broadcast the siege live, his telephone call to his lover Leon (a trans woman whose gender-affirmation surgery is the reason Sonny needs the money), and his slow recognition that there is no successful exit. The film is based, fairly closely, on the real-life robbery by John Wojtowicz, which was extensively documented in the press at the time.
Pacino had won Best Supporting Actor nominations for The Godfather (1972) and Best Actor for Serpico (1973). Dog Day Afternoon arrived the year after The Godfather Part II (1974, also Best Actor nomination). The mid-1970s Pacino is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-sustained peaks of any actor's career in modern American cinema.
What Dog Day Afternoon allows Pacino to do is play a Pacino character outside the Corleone-and-Serpico register he had been working in. Sonny is a small-time desperate man with no plan, no competence, and a moral structure that is genuinely his own (his motivation is, for the period, unusually progressive). The 'Attica! Attica!' improvised chant — Sonny's rallying call to the Brooklyn crowd outside, invoking the 1971 prison riot in which 43 people died — is the most-quoted sequence and the film's structural pivot.
John Cazale appeared in only five feature films before his death from lung cancer in 1978 at age 42. The films: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978). All five were Best Picture nominees at the Oscars. The 100% Best Picture rate is unprecedented.
Cazale's Sal Naturile in Dog Day Afternoon is one of his best performances. Sal is mostly silent. He answers Sonny's questions in monosyllables. When asked which country he'd like to flee to, he answers 'Wyoming.' The performance is built almost entirely from listening and reaction. Pacino has spoken about Cazale across the decades as the actor who taught him the most about screen presence.
Lumet shot the film on the actual Brooklyn street where the 1972 robbery had taken place. The bank set was built inside a real building. The Brooklyn crowd in the film includes both extras and actual Brooklyn residents who showed up to watch the production. The verisimilitude is the foundation of the film's power.
Lumet was a New York director whose entire filmography is, in some sense, in conversation with New York as a place. 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Network (1976), The Verdict (1982) — all use the city or the city's institutions as foundational material. Dog Day Afternoon is, of the Lumet filmography, the most-specific in its Brooklyn-block geographical fidelity.