San Diego Reader

Movies

Dog Day Afternoon

Sidney Lumet's three-ring-circus staging of a bungled bank stickup, Brooklyn, 1972, that turned into a hot summer day standoff between the robbers and their hostages, inside the bank, and the N.Y.P.D. and F.B.I. outside. An exemplary New York street movie, rich in incident of the Oh-God-what-next variety. Also an exemplary actors' movie, with Al Pacino's and Charles Durning's across-the-street negotiations especially giving the thing a kind of dog-fight snarl and yap. It is an audience movie as well, however. And the decision to model it as a star vehicle for Pacino, with the predicament seen exclusively from his inside-a-trap vantage point, forces the audience to regard the principal bank robber as simply a headache-sufferer rather than a headache-causer. With John Cazale, Chris Sarandon, and James Broderick. 1975.