Every Dog Will Have His Bill

In 1972, two men tried to rob a bank in Brooklyn. In 1975, Sydney Lumet made a movie about it called Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in one of his greatest roles.

The film begins with naturalistic footage of the streets of New York City. It is a story about New York and New York culture. The way the robbers and the bank employees quickly lapse into a rapport, almost against their wills, shows them to be part of the same community.

The employees consist of a bank manager--a large man whose idea of professional behaviour is to be as accommodating as possible to the robbers--and a group of women who are so authentically drawn I had no trouble believing this is a true story. When Sonny (Pacino) takes one woman to the bathroom because she complains she'll need to go if she's locked in the vault, they find another woman in the bathroom who'd been oblivious to the whole robbery. The woman Sonny was escorting immediately starts complaining that the woman in the bathroom always takes longer breaks than she's supposed to.

Everyone's more driven by subconscious sympathies and patterns of behaviour than they are by the true logistics of the situation, right down to the end when the woman from the bathroom gives Sal (John Cazale), the other, more psychopathic, robber, her crucifix because he's anxious about going on a plane for the first time.

It's in this atmosphere that Sonny interacts with the police and the crowds outside who gather and start to consider him a hero. Even when it turns out Sonny's gay and has a transgender wife, the crowd is still on his side despite the '70s U.S. not being as enlightened on gay rights as it is to-day. It seems to me the movie fits with Vanishing Point and Convoy and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as part of a series of '70s movies about a criminal who quickly achieves a kind of folk hero status. But the robbers are so clumsy--they don't wear masks, Sonny never makes much effort to conceal their names. If the crowds love him, it's more out of pity than respect.

Pacino is certainly on fire in this role. For all the clumsiness and bad luck, he seems to hold the operation together by the pure tenacity visible at all times in his eyes.

Mostly the film has the sense of realism that distinguishes most of the best American movies of the '70s except, for whatever reason, everyone in the movie is impeccably dressed. Even psychopath Sal has a nice burgundy suit with a window pane patterned dress shirt and peach and white patterned tie. Everyone's perfectly colour coordinated. It's nice but kind of a false note in an otherwise impressively authentic endeavour.

Dog Day Afternoon is available on The Criterion Channel.