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.
Product Identifiers
Producer
Martin Bregman, Martin Elfand
EAN
7321905337279
eBay Product ID (ePID)
59529775
Product Key Features
Film/TV Title
Dog Day Afternoon
Actor
Chris Sarandon, Charles Durning, Al Pacino, James Broderick, John Cazale, Carol Kane
Director
Sidney Lumet
Format
DVD
Language
English
Release Year
2006
Run Time
213 Mins
Genre
Drama, General
Additional Product Features
Certificate
TBA
Number of Discs
2
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States of America
Director of Photography
Victor J. Kemper
Art Director
Douglas Higgins
Costume Designer
Anna Hill Johnstone
Set Designer
Robert Drumheller
Production Designer
Charles Bailey
Reviews
Chicago Reader - One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice, Empire - Pacino simmers in this daring and brilliantly constructed treatise on the many facets of a crime, New York Times - Sidney Lumet's most accurate, most flamboyant New York movie
Author
Frank Pierson
Movie/TV Title
Dog Day Afternoon
Awards
Best Screenplay Written Directly For The Screen 1976 - Frank Pierson