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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
In the mid-70s, the US seemed to be lost in a chaotic haze. The optimism of the 60s had faded. Vietnam had exposed Americans to the ugliest realities of the country’s military actions. Nixon had resigned. President Ford didn’t seem to have an agenda. A recession was dragging the economy down. Unemployment was high. And the certainties that Americans had embraced in the post-WWII era had been shredded by years of cultural upheaval.
Against this backdrop, the story of two hapless guys why try to rob a bank and end up trapped inside, holding the employees hostage, seems like a reflection of the country’s state of mind. A desperate story for desperate times.
Dog Day Afternoon was inspired by an actual bank robbery, which P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore wrote about in a Life magazine article entitled “The Boys in the Bank”. Frank Pierson’s screenplay sticks fairly close to the facts. Director Sidney Lumet felt it was important to keep the film grounded in reality, and in his book Making Movies, he gives his account of how the script evolved over time. According to Lumet, in order create the feeling of real life unfolding on the screen, he told the actors that they needed to play the parts as close to themselves as possible, even encouraging them to wear their own clothes. Taking the director’s lead, one of the actors asked if they could use their own words. Though he had never allowed improvisation before, Lumet agreed.
Still using Pierson’s screenplay as the foundation, the actors were allowed to improvise in rehearsals, and the rehearsals were recorded. Each night, the script was reworked to incorporate dialogue that the actors had come up with during the day. This is likely one of the reasons that the film has such bracing spontaneity. Rather than speaking dialogue, the characters seem to be speaking their own words. Instead of watching scenes in a drama, we get the sense that we’re witnessing events as they unfold. As the botched bank robbery turns into a hostage situation, as the NYPD tries to figure out their next move, as the crowd on the street grows larger, it’s clear that no one is in control and there’s no way to predict what will happen next.
The photography reinforces the documentary feeling. Lumet and cinematographer Victor Kemper employed natural light wherever possible. The bank interiors are lit by fluorescents. For the night exteriors they relied on spotlights from emergency vehicles. And Dede Allen’s crisp, unobtrusive editing gives the film structure without making it seem forced. Dog Day Afternoon doesn’t hit the same beats as the standard Hollywood movie. It has its own subtle rhythm.
While Dog Day Afternoon was financed by a Hollywood studio, it seems very much a part of the New York school of filmmaking. In the 50s, independent filmmakers working in the city, like Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin and John Cassavettes, tried to scrape away the gloss and glamour of commercial cinema to capture life as people really lived it. They shot on actual locations using hand-held cameras to capture the look and feel of urban life. In the late 60s and early 70s, Hollywood studios began to back projects that built on this approach, like Born to Win and Panic in Needle Park. Warner Bros. greenlighted Dog Day Afternoon at the peak of this trend. In the 70s American audiences seemed willing to explore the grittier side of urban life. But by the 80s, audiences were running back to safety, and Hollywood delivered a steady supply of comedies and action flicks.
Al Pacino’s performance has been highly praised, and rightly so. There’s a naked vulnerability in his portrayal of Sonny that’s unusual in American filmmaking. But while Pacino is at the center of the story, the film is really an ensemble effort, and even the performers in the smallest roles are vivid and lively. John Cazale is eerily introverted as Sonny’s partner, Sal. Sully Boyar plays the bank manager with an air of exhausted resignation. He just wants to make it through the day alive. Penelope Allen is especially vivid as one of the tellers. She may be a hostage, but she’s not going to let these guys push her around. But to me the most impressive thing about these performers is the way they’re always in character and they’re always connected. Pacino may be in the foreground, but Lumet makes sure that the actors in the background are reacting to whatever’s going on. And as the day drags on, as the tension grinds everybody down, they all seem to be drawing closer together.
As the cop who’s pretending to be in charge of the situation, Charles Durning gives us a man who knows he’s in over his head and is hoping he can bluff his way through this mess. James Broderick is quietly creepy as the stoic, implacable FBI man. He’s just waiting for the right moment to shut these guys down. And Chris Sarandon gives a moving performance as Leon. Sonny may be at the end of his rope, but so is Leon. They may love each other, but they know it’s not going anywhere.
One of the reasons the 70s was such an amazing period in American cinema was that a film this harsh, this gritty, this different, could be a success at the box office. Apparently Dog Day Afternoon resonated with audiences. It is a tense, engrossing film that holds up well today. But I think the reason audiences responded was that Pierson, Lumet and the cast made it a compelling human story. Ultimately it’s not about bank robbers and hostages. It’s about people.
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
Many of the earliest American movies were made in New York. While the center of commercial production shifted to Los Angeles in the teens, low-budget producers were still making films on the East Coast during the twenties and thirties. After WWII there was a resurgence of production in New York, and in the fifties independent filmmakers created a style all their own. Instead of Hollywood fantasy, these films embraced gritty reality. Instead of relying solely on studio sets, the directors often shot in the city streets.
Robert Wise was a product of the studio system. Starting out as an editor, he had worked his way up the ladder at RKO and in the forties he became a director. Early films like The Body Snatcher, The Set-Up and The Day the Earth Stood Still had earned him a good deal of attention. At his best, Wise had a taut, straightforward approach that worked especially well in the world of B-movies.
But Odds Against Tomorrow feels totally different from Wise’s studio work. It has a looseness, a freedom that you don’t find in the director’s lean, suspenseful Hollywood thrillers. I think in large part this is because he was working in New York. It may have been the crew, or the locations, or maybe just stepping outside of the Hollywood box, but this movie stands apart from anything he’d done before.
To start with, the tone of Joseph Brun’s photography is different from anything I’ve seen coming out of Hollywood at the time. Brun’s images are rich and complex, but the light is generally diffused, giving us few solid blacks and bright whites, more shades of grey. The film takes place in winter, and the light feels thin and chilly. It’s also interesting to see how much attention is given to things on the periphery, details that don’t advance the story. Working in Hollywood, Wise was known for a direct, no-frills approach. Here the camera lingers on the shadows cast by horses on a merry-go-round, newspapers flying down an empty street, a pool of water rippling in the gutter.
This wouldn’t just be Brun’s doing. I suspect that this willingness to linger on the details is at least in part the work of Dede Allen. Odds Against Tomorrow is one of Allen’s earliest feature credits, but she had been working as an editor for years. Of course, Wise had started his career as an editor, but the rhythms here are definitely a departure from his previous work. My feeling is that this more creative, intuitive approach is probably due to Allen’s involvement. It seems to point toward her later work with Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. Instead of moving relentlessly forward, the film allows us to look around and linger on things that don’t advance the plot. The focus is less on the story than it is on mood, atmosphere, character.
The characters are very interesting. Ed Begley is Dave, an ex-cop who got busted and has fallen on hard times. He seems to be a sensitive, caring person, but he’s willing to do some ugly things to get what he wants. Robert Ryan gives a stunning, low-key performance. He has tremendous authority on the screen, and he uses it to pull us inside characters who are deeply flawed and deeply unhappy. Playing Earle, Ryan manages to keep us with him every minute, even though the man is a bitter, violent racist.
Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley and Robert Ryan
Johnny, played by Harry Belafonte, is the most sympathetic of the three, and also the most complicated. At first he appears to be smart, suave and confident, a talented nightclub performer who’s enjoying a certain amount of success. But as we learn more about him, we realize that his life isn’t nearly as sweet as it seems. The failure of his marriage is eating away at him, and his addiction to gambling has put him in a huge financial hole. And race is also an issue for Johnny, though it’s hard to pin his feelings down exactly. When he’s in his own world he seems completely comfortable with his white friends, but when he sees his wife inviting white acquaintances to her apartment, he can’t keep his resentment from boiling over. Belafonte plays the part with a striking mixture of assurance and sensitivity.
We wouldn’t get such vivid performances if the script didn’t provide such interesting characters. The screenplay was written by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding, based on the novel by William P. McGivern. As with many of the best heist films, the focus isn’t on the job but on the people. The robbery is a mechanism that allows us to observe the lives of these three men, and to watch how they interact. As the pressure builds, we see each of them slowly starting to crack, we see more of who they really are.
And John Lewis’ music provides a rich, resonant background for all of this. The jazz score is another aspect of the film that ties it to the New York school. There were many soundtracks written in Hollywood that incorporated jazz elements, but in New York the filmmakers often turned to actual jazz musicians. Lewis paints a moody, brooding backdrop for this bleak tale of desperation. He’s not afraid to use dissonance, and his brass arrangements make the tension in the story palpable. For the quieter moments he turns to vibes and guitar, which complement the sombre visuals well.
Wise made a number of excellent films in his long career, and he wasn’t afraid to take chances, to try new things. His openness to different approaches is probably one of the reasons Odds Against Tomorrow is such a striking movie. If he had shot it in Hollywood, it might have been a solid thriller. But I think shooting it in New York made it something more.
Reality Is Scary 