Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Sidney Lumet
Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik challenges societal definitions of deviancy and becomes a Dillinger-esque figure in 1970′s Brooklyn, New York.
There are so many things to discuss in this two hour movie but before I go into characters I wanted to take a minute and address how much of the environment is shaping this movie in the 1970′s Brooklyn and I also want to say that I’m proud of Al Pacino for the roles he has chosen relating to queer culture. I wish I had seen Cruising because I know that it probably would have added some understanding to Dog Day Afternoon but I will have to put it on the shelf for a later time.
For those who haven’t read Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. are missing a chunk of what this movie has to offer. I only know this because I was fortunate to have had a father who grew up at by the Navy yards in Brooklyn, and if you have read Last Exit to Brooklyn, you’ll know that the area was a hotbed for the raw counter-culture where drugs, prostitution, and violence were more powerful than any outside societal structures.
It’s hard for me to explain my understanding of that era secondhand, but while there was extreme strife, some cosmic chaos uniquely culminated to create a dark cloud that offered profound human insights in the linings. Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik is as phenomenal as he is devastatingly handsome. He caught my breath simply being on screen and I was mesmerized by him.
The plot is too essential so if you don’t want to be spoiled then you probably shouldn’t be here anyway (Go watch it first! don’t let my opinions influence you). Sonny is robbing a bank during the hottest period of the year to pay for his wife Leon’s sex reassignment surgery. The title is called Dog Day Afternoon and a dog day is when it is so hot and humid that things swelter and slow to an uncomfortable stillness. I’m not sure if anyone who is reading this has happened to be in NYC during late August but it is nearly unbearable. The humidity is so palpable that you can’t tell if you’re wet from the air or if you’re just profusely sweating. Your clothes cling to you and sweat pools up on your forehead, armpits, breasts, and back. The sidewalks stick to your shoes as the tar melts in the streets and the smell of cooking garbage is… This is the day that Sonny and his partner Sal (John Cazale) chose to operate their mission and the title offers some more advice on how to sense the setting we are being thrown into and will later explain the changes in the health of the captives.
While Sonny and Sal begin their heist they show that they are knowledgeable and will not be conned, but Sonny almost immediately demonstrates great benevolence to the bank employees. Even going as far to cite his Catholicism as proof of his own pacifism. We even see a distribution of power as one of the captive’s gives Sonny lip about watching his language in front of the women. We see him agree and we realize that the hostages are not in any real danger nor do they feel like they are. While Sonny is trying to see that everyone is treated fairly while also making an exit the phone rings and it is the police and now the situation has gotten more complex. With braggadocio, Sonny tells police “We are Vietnam veterans so killing doesn’t mean anything to us”.
The hostage negotiator Sergeant Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) asks for Sonny to release a hostage as a sign of good faith to which Sonny released the asthmatic security guard. Once outside he is shown the full effect of the police force and we see Sonny shrink with fear which is not ideal for an armed robbery hostage situation. With support from the head teller of the bank Sylvia “The Mouth” (Penelope Allen) Sonny rouses the crowd by shouting “Attica”. A reference to a violent revolution between prisoners and the guards in Attica, NY which lead to much-needed reforms in the prison system but had around 40 casualties. Sylvia humiliates the police by refusing to join the crowd outside.
The reference to Attica struck a chord with me and made me stop and think about the perceived role in which we label what behavior is acceptable and not acceptable. From what we know about Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon (his estranged wife and children, his homosexuality, his transsexual wife, his stay in prison, and not forgetting his armed robbery) by all accounts he is a deviant. Yet here we are hopelessly in love with him as a character and so are the hostages around him, who after learning of his homosexuality welcome him in almost a sewing circle way while they are sitting around chatting on the floor of the bank and reading Dear Abby which has an illuminating allegory of repressed sexuality.
There is a concept of deviation by a sociologist named Durkheim that I stumbled upon and will copy and paste from Wikipedia that I think explains what I mean better than I can.
Durkheim (1858–1917) claimed that deviance was, in fact, a normal and necessary part of social organization.[1] When he studied deviance he stated four important functions of deviance.
“Deviance affirms cultural values and norms. Any definition of virtue rests on an opposing idea of vice: There can be no good without evil and no justice without crime”.[3]Deviance defines moral boundaries, people learn right from wrong by defining people as deviant.A serious form of deviance forces people to come together and react in the same way against it.Deviance pushes society’s moral boundaries which, in turn, leads to social change.
In summary, he believed criminality is a response to our society and that we need to look at the larger issues if we want to create a change. When thinking about it this way, who could blame Sonny for wanting what society has shown him is rightfully his (the pursuit of happiness) but made his chances of owning this life of happiness nearly impossible. Sonny’s life, and the lives of everyone around him are merely a progression of negative freedoms. Freedoms that you can have if you have the means but that you are not free to enjoy without consequences. An example of positive and negative freedoms can be explained by a woman going to get her nose done. She has the freedom and the means to do so for her own pleasure and this is positive freedom. Negative freedom is when Leon (Chris Sarandon) has the opportunity to become a woman but not without serious financial consequences. Who can survive a life existing on purely negative freedoms in 1970s Brooklyn? Not very many and it was this situation that led my father to move to Canada and build his own cabin far away from other people for a large part of his life, although he never gave up that fighting spirit and his distrust of the government he learned from his youth in the landscape Lumet is showing us.
On the phone, Leon and Sonny are able to say goodbye after Sonny makes sure that Leon is okay. Leon is now living up in Bellevue which is a mental institution in NY. They seem to be supportive and actually helpful to Leon and he declines the invitation from Sonny to go to Algeria together.
But Leon and Sonny are not the only ones hurting in this drama. Sonny’s other wife Angie (Susan Peretz) broke my heart. In a heart-wrenching phone call we hear her break down and for a moment we are transported to a perspective of her life, her public humiliation and the tearful heartache at knowing that her husband was in love with another man. However, her focus isn’t so much on Leon as it is about her children. We might have difficulty with this scene because we are so caught up in Sonny’s story that her lack of empathy for Sonny might get on our nerves - as we witness Sonny’s sudden explosion of anger at his wife as she makes a tearful accusation of his anger and her inability to help him cope. But while she might not be the saint we wish she could be for Sonny at this moment, I’m not sure if I could be any better, although I’d like to hope that I would be. Angie’s character development is something that I sincerely hope I never have to experience for myself or any of my sister women and friends.
Slowly the hour’s pass. Another hostage is sick but recovers after a doctor is let in and still refuses to leave the bank. The police send in Sonny’s mother who frantically tries to persuade him to run for his life but in her hysterics, she is not able to get him to leave. She is sent away after verbally demonizing Sonny’s wife Angie for being ugly, fat, and stupid and that being the reason for Sonny’s conflicted sexuality. Another dagger went into my heart watching this verbal assault from Sonny’s own mother about someone who earlier in the movie had admitted Sonny’s violence but never that his character was flawed unlike Leon in the interrogation room next door to the bank.
The bus arrives and Sonny approaches to check out the bus. He inspects most of the compartments and seats while the driver mentions that he thought he was going to be picking up men to go to the massage parlors which I thought was an odd admission of being part of something sketchy but I couldn’t put my finger on what. When we see the bus driver refuses to drive Sonny and co. to the airport although being offered money I was thinking that maybe I had made a mistake in misjudging him and I realized that it makes sense for a black man in Brooklyn to not engage with a man trying to escape from a bank robbery filled with police, I was thinking this we hear the bus driver says “Those who want to shoot, aim at the white meat.” I immediately thought okay, so I was right, he doesn’t want to engage, but then realize that he had moved to the driver’s seat of the bus and my internal alarms immediately went off as did Sonny’s, who suddenly changed his mind and asked for the FBI agent to drive him instead and revealed that the “driver” was actually an undercover cop.
We know that this movie will not end with the flight to Algeria that Sonny hopes for so desperately. When they arrive at the scene of the airport there is a small confusion and Syl is shot in the head and Sunny is arrested. We learn from the screen that he was imprisoned for 20 years, his children subsided on welfare without him, and that Leon had his sex change operation. While I wasn’t happy with an arrest, I was very grateful that he was not killed and I was hopeful that the 20 years would give him a chance to rebuild his life in a more integrated way.
All in all, movies like Dog Day Afternoon are the reason why I am a staunch supporter of queer culture. Stories like Leon’s are everywhere today and the tragic implications of societal shame are what makes for severe consequences in the lives of the public. If homosexuality had been accepted at the time of this incident, Leon could be the woman she feels she is inside, Sonny could fix the years of sexual repression, and maybe Angie wouldn’t have had children with a man who didn’t love her and could have had a much different (and happier) life.
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