Defining Favourites: Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Sidney Lumet's portrait of a bank robbery gone wrong is an indictment of police incompetency.

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Sidney Lumet
Screenplay by Frank Pierson, from the Life article “The Boys in the Bank” by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore
Produced by Martin Bregman, Martin Elfand
Starring Al Pacino, John Cazale, James Broderick, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Penelope Allen, Lance Henricksen, Carol Kane, Sully Boyar
Premiere Date: September 20, 1975
Running Time: 125 minutes

Dog Day Afternoon is more than just a story about a robbery gone wrong: it’s a story about being the center of an unnecessary spectacle. Everything supposedly might have been planned, but the more time we spend with Sonny Wortzik and Sal Naturile, we begin to realize why their robbery ended up becoming so easily botched. Every minute of this movie feels like you’re caught in a state of panic, owing to the fact that Sonny and Sal have a simple demand: they’re simply trying to rob money in order to pay for the gender confirmation surgery for Sonny’s life partner. If one were to talk about how this movie handles transgender issues, then Dog Day Afternoon may not be the most forward-thinking film in that regard, but as a portrait of police incompetency, it’s astonishingly ahead of its time.

This all begins by manner of how everything is done on a matter of impulses. They thought they had a solid enough plan: rob a bank, take the money, and get on out of there so that everyone else can move on with their daily lives. Fittingly enough, everything escalates from the moment when Sonny realizes that they came to rob the bank shortly after the cash collection and find that the vault is nearly empty. Except Sonny thinks that there’s more stashed in the back, as he would know from having worked at a bank. As the situation continues escalating and catches the attention of the police, the power felt from Dog Day Afternoon is best expressed by manner of how we come to understand what brought Sonny into this place to begin with.