Dog Day Afternoon

In 2009, Dog Day Afternoon was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

On August 22, 1972, first-time crook Sonny Wortzik and his friends Salvatore "Sal" Naturile and Stevie attempt to rob the First Brooklyn Savings Bank.

When the requested limousine arrives, Sonny checks for hidden weapons or booby traps, and selects Agent Murphy to drive him, Sal and the remaining hostages to Kennedy Airport.

We learn that Sonny is sentenced to twenty years in prison, that Angie and her children subsist on welfare, and that Leon is a woman living in New York City.

On August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile and Robert Westenberg attempted to rob a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn.

[20] In his article published by The Village Voice, he laid out Wojtowicz's connection to pornographer Mike Umbers and proposed that the heist was organized by the Gambino crime family instead.

The crew built a bank set with movable walls, which allowed Lumet to place the cameras as he desired, and to use long lenses to shoot from a distance.

[46] To capture Pacino's movements in a natural fashion, and to allow the actor greater mobility, Lumet integrated the use of roller skates and wheelchairs for the cameramen in the panoramic shots.

Lumet would order the camera operators to be pulled as Pacino acted to make the scene look "naturalistic", and "like it was shot by television cameramen, fighting their way through the crowd".

[46] Pacino shot the first scene wearing sunglasses, but he asked the director to re-shoot it after watching the dailies, as he felt that Sonny "wanted to get caught".

[46] Sarandon felt that the conversation was welcomed by the audiences because it "wasn't about a drag queen and his boyfriend", and that it reflected two people that were "trying to come to grips with what is wrong in their relationship.

[43] His worries were based on what he considered "the defensive attitude on sexual subjects": to avoid it, he focused on portraying emotional performances by the actors throughout the film.

Lumet planned to use it in the film; the scene would have featured the footage broadcast on a television in the bank, but he decided not to include it, as he felt it would be "unrecoverable" and that the audiences would not "take the rest of the movie seriously".

[61] New York Daily News gave Dog Day Afternoon four stars: it described the film as a "gut-level human comedy" and called Pacino "stunning", "brilliantly erratic and terribly touching".

Sarris also noted that "pain [came] pouring out of Pacino's eyes" as he deemed Sonny a "Freudian tragic hero", and that the combination with Cazale's character's "deadpan death wish" produced "much emotional debris".

Sarris pointed that the dialogue featured "two wounded creatures capable of an extraordinary emotional audacity", and concluded that the film was to be "seen, but not swallowed whole" and "making heroes out of felons" was "a short step to utter chaos".

"[67] Gene Siskel gave Dog Day Afternoon four stars on his review for the Chicago Tribune, and rated the film as "superb", noting the "scenes mixing the fear of violence with insane laughter".

[68] United Press International defined it as an "exceptionally fine film—outrageously funny and deeply moving", and welcomed Pacino's acting as a "dazzing display".

His review on the Philadelphia Daily News continued by calling the film "super-charged", and "multi-leveled" by "a slapstick comedy, tense drama, caper tale, biographical material and character study".

Critic Kevin Kelly hailed the editing by Allen as "brilliant", and defined Pacino's performance as "virtuose" and Cazele's as "shyly and sorrowfully eloquent".

Critic Lou Cedrone felt that it was "natural and true"; he stressed that Pierson's script, combined with the work of Pacino and Lumet, made the drama "never uncomfortable".

Critic John Huddy expressed that the street scenes were "magnificently staged", and that Lumet "finds order in chaos, sense in insanity".

[76] The Guardian opined that Dog Day Afternoon presented Lumet's "best film for some considerable time", and deemed Pacino's acting as "brilliant" and Cazale's as "well-observed".

[81] Analysis in the 21st century of Dog Day Afternoon has interpreted it as an "anti-authoritarian film" that "defied the establishment," particularly with the emphasis on the Attica Prison riot and the character's resentment toward the police.

[86][87] In 2009, Dog Day Afternoon was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The website's consensus reads: "Dog Day Afternoon offers a finely detailed snapshot of people in crisis with tension-soaked drama shaded in black humor.

[1] Christopher Null wrote in 2006 that the film "captures perfectly the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, a time when optimism was scraping rock bottom and John Wojtowicz was as good a hero as we could come up with".

The San Francisco Chronicle reflected on the time of its release, and the reviewer felt that "it seemed as if the great movies would never stop, when the extraordinary creative burst we'd been seeing in the 1970s looked as though it might go on forever".

Club called it a "frank social melodrama that's also a celebration of quotidian bravery", while it praised the cinematography by Kemper that "captures the joy as well as the decay of a crowded city".

[126] In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed Dog Day Afternoon as the twentieth best edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.

Photograph of the Chase branch involved in the robbery
The Chase branch in 1975
Pacino and Allen, re-entering the bank on a scene