At a Glance

Before Peter Finch was mad as hell in NETWORK, Sidney Lumet's scorching indictment of the American television industry, Al Pacino played an equally ferocious and fed-up bank robber in Lumet's classic film DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Pacino is heartbreakingly real as Sonny, a smart and tough if self-destructive Brooklyn tough whose plan to rob the local bank to fund his male lover's (Chris Sarandon) sex change goes absurdly wrong. Accompanied only by his doltish accomplice, Sal (John Cazale), Sonny resorts to kidnapping a handful of bank employees when he realises that all the money had been removed before his arrival. As the lengthy August day drags on, Sonny and the hordes of local police, led by Sergeant Moretti (Charles Durning), make little progress, and eventually Sonny's wife and lover are brought to the scene. The crowd's sympathy is immediately captured by the charismatic Sonny, whose antagonism with the police is played out before an audience of millions, leading to an inevitably tragic finish. Balancing suspense, violence, and humor, the film's depiction of a grand scale media event craftily dives from the political to the personal, evoking a piercing portrait of a single man and his devastating downward tumble into the cracks of the system that Lumet made a career of chronicling.

Detailed Information

Dog Day Afternoon is one of the most popular crime films to emerge from that notoriously gritty decade of filmmaking. Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Network) directs Al Pacino, who gives an electrifying performance as a desperate New Yorker whose botched up a bank robbery has disastrous consequences.

Based on actual events which saw two daring but ultimately incompetent men attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank in August 1972 in order to fund a sex change operation for a boyfriend, Dog Day Afternoon is an intense drama that is both funny and gripping in equal parts. Nominated for Academy Awards in six catagories including Best Film, Best Actor (Pacino) and Best Director (Lumet), the film eventually won Best Original Screenplay for Frank Pierson’s (Cool Hand Luke) explosive script.

On one scorching hot Summer day in New York, three amateur bank robbers plan to hold up a Brooklyn bank. A nice simple robbery: Walk in, take the money, and run. Unfortunately, the supposedly uncomplicated heist suddenly becomes a bizarre nightmare as everything that could go wrong does. Sonny (Al Pacino) and his dim-witted crime partner Sal (John Cazale, The Godfather), find themselves in the midst of a media circus when the building is surrounded by police and they decide to take the people in the bank hostage. Viewers watching the robbery live on television elevate Sonny to rebel hero status and he plays to the various pressure groups who have gathered outside, mistaking his desperate greed for political motivation.