Brooklyn Bomb Gets Bronx Cheer

A DOG'S ASS WAGGING IN Brooklyn garbage and a bopping Elton John soundtrack open Sidney Lumet's overexcited mongrel of a film about a bank robbery. A high-spirited, sporadically funny film about a trivial event, Dog Day Afternoon is at odds with itself. Its mixed parentage--one part action shoot-out, one part ethnic sit-com, and two parts documentary--makes it an entertaining enough mutt, but hard to control. It wanders in several directions at once and over-whelms its charming moments in tedious incoherence.

Dog Day Afternoonchronicles a small-time bank robbery that, as the titles proclaim, actually took place in New York three years ago. It was one of those suffocatingly sticky days in late August when, supposedly, dogs go mad and people lose control, no longer able to keep their secret passions on ice. Sonny (Al Pacino), a nervous bungler, tries to pull off a heist in half an hour, scrambling the job so badly that it becomes an all-day extravaganza.

Pacino nearly holds the film together. His brown eyes are great pools of Italian soul (though he's supposed to be Polish), and his mournful dachshund face looks scared as he explodes into frenzied wisecracking when his plans crumble. Pacino has some of Woody Allen's earnest ineptitude: raiding the cash registers, he tries to burn the receipts in a compulsive fit and causes a wastebasket fire that attracts passerbys. "I'm a Catholic, I don't want to hurt anybody, ya understand?" he screams in a panic, upsetting a potted fern. Instead of getting out fast, he dawdles so long that he's soon surrounded by police.

Inside the bank a stereotyped sit-com develops around Sonny, his stupid accomplice, ten giggly bank tellers, and the irate manager. Outside, the street scene becomes an urbanized Bonanza as fleets of cops swarm up the fire-escapes, helicopters circle overhead, FBI men flood to the scene, and reporters come puffing up with their cameramen. It's an official's dream: what police chief, FBI man, or reporter has ever had enough time to cover a bank robbery on the spot? Indeed, what film director?

LUMET WAS SO ENGROSSED in covering a real news story that he made in a hip documentary about the event as though its factual basis were its most exciting aspect. He's got the Super-Journalist conceits that produce disorganized, melodramatic, drawn-out cinema. He doggedly records every harangue, phone call and twist of the action, including the dead spaces in between. Like a faithful reporter he never leaves the scene of the crime; since most of the film is shot in the bank's cramped interior, the visual monotony is relieved only by occasional shots of the street and a few crosscuts to Sonny's apartment. He dwells on ethnicity as though it were the last word since Bridget and Bernie, giving us social realism with a fond look at hysterical Italians, hot-blooded Latins, and stupid, good-natured blacks. Presumably in the name of verisimilitude, he refuses to edit out repetitive or slow-moving sequences. A real drama under Lumet's direction might keep us in the theater for days.

The "human interest" angle surfaces late in the film, when we find out that Sonny is robbing the bank to finance his male lover's sex-change operation. (It's true, it's true, pipes up Lumet at the end of the film, flashing tidbit titles on the screen with such information as "Leon is now a woman and lives in New York".) The fluttery, tearful character of Leon, on screen for only 15 minutes, elicits more sympathy for Sonny and does more to establish his humanity than all the antics we've already seen. Other shreds of Sonny's life flash briefly on the screen and are whisked away. The heist drags on.

Dog Day Afternoon should have been, and almost was, a film about the pathos and mediocrity of American heroism. The portrait of Sonny, flat and droolingly sentimentalized, is still that of a man surprised by his desire for fame. Why else does he end up besieged in the bank for hours, screaming at the cops and clowning for the crowds? It's the only time in his life he's ever been worthy of public attention. "I want a military funeral," he insists solemnly near the end of the film.

EVERYONE ELSE on the scene wants to be a hero, too; the dizzy head teller refuses her chance to be released from the bank, waves exhilaratedly at the TV cameras and marches back inside, and the police chief, in John Waynesque extravagance, summons several hundred of his men when ten would have done just as well. These greedy gambits for recognition are cutely or comically presented and then quickly filed away. Any social comment they could have made is overshadowed by bell-ringer lines like Sonny's bleated "We're Vietnam veterans, so killing means nothing to us, ya understand?"

Lumet was trying for too many effects here--a sheen of high farce, an underpinning of grave pathos, and a focus on local color and American style. As in Serpico, he was trying to capture New York. He was also trying, with the groovy relevance of a mid-60's liberal, to make a trendy statement about bad cops, good robbers, Watergate and Vietnam. But he couldn't control his techniques. He cut so flippantly from one to the other--a laugh here, a sob there--that he destroyed the thoughtful consistency that would have elicited emotional response. Dog Day Afternoon ends up being as realistic and immediate as Dragnet, and no more nor less contemporary than the Nehru jacket was in 1965.