Delving Deeper Into the Perennial Appeal of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’

‘Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon’By Rachel Walther Headpress, 152 pages“Dog Day Afternoon,” a film directed by the renowned Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, a witty and charismatic bank robber based on John Wojtowicz, the actual leader of a 1972 Brooklyn holdup, remains after fifty years a provocative drama of a disaffected man in a society in conflict with itself —identifying as much with the entertaining criminal as with his bank hostages.In a New York Sun review last month of the stage adaptation, Elysa Gardner noted that the audience cheered Sonny’s attacks on the governor, mayor, and president as criminals “as if he were attacking a current official.” What made the film riveting in 1975 evidently speaks as well to audiences today, which is why Rachel Walther’s group biography backstory of the robbery, and the film made out of it, is an important cultural contribution.Ms. Walther carefully explains how a daring film attracted a star like Al Pacino, playing a gay man in love with a trans woman. No male movie star had yet attempted such a role, and Mr. Pacino, still at the start of his career in film, accepted the risk, realizing the potential of what at the time was characterized as a bizarre folk hero.Mr. Pacino’s real life model proclaimed the desperate robbery attempt stemmed from his quest to obtain money for his lover’s sex change operation. Like the real life John Wojtowicz, Mr. Pacino’s Sonny plays to the crowd, shouting “Attica,” aligning himself with the prisoners who died in the Attica prison revolt — all victims of law enforcement when their protest against degrading living conditions led to their deaths.Mr. Pacino plays Sonny as a naif, a character who creates sympathy for himself because of his inability to comprehend the complexities of his circumstances even as he demands respect for his plight, creating a kind of fable about a psyche under siege.Ms. Walther shows that unlike Sonny, John Wojtowicz was not quite so innocent and was, in fact, a master manipulator, although the extent to which he believed in his story is left open to doubt. In “Born to Lose” we get to hear his voice as well as that of his lover’s, revealing the curiously crass yet sensitive perceptions of a couple marginalized by society.Ms. Walther, a film historian, expertly aligns the trajectory of Pacino’s career with the biography of the character he impersonates, while also doing justice to the other supporting players, especially John Cazale and Chris Sarandon who worked diligently with Sidney Lumet to bring to life the script written by Frank Pierson.Pierson, like Lumet, allowed the actors to make changes in the script that arose out of weeks of rehearsal. It was Lumet’s decision to work on location, to recreate the interior of the bank on site in Brooklyn, surrounded by crowds not unlike the theater audience Elysa Gardner described. Location shooting meant that the actors thrived on the energetic responsiveness of the locals watching them — an important factor for Mr. Pacino and Mr. Sarandon who had to extemporize on the street as did the principals in the real life robbery.An accompanying theme of “Born to Lose” is John Wojtowicz’s life long effort to tell his own story, which culminates in a documentary featuring him as the narrator. As a result, Ms. Walther is able to provide a fascinating parallel life, so to speak, with Wojtowicz, who died in 2006, alternately affirming and taking issue with the film and with Pacino’s performance.Occasionally Ms. Walther lapses into cliché. For example, when years after the robbery Wojtowicz hilariously tries to get a job as bank teller, she writes: “No bank would touch him with a ten-foot pole.” But in the main, her biography/film and cultural study is tightly organized and gripping. She has diligently drawn on archives holding material on the lives of the actual bank robbers and interviewed several of the hostages who gradually came to identify with their captors.No wonder, then, that fascination with a 1972 bank robbery remains high. There is, in fact, a Brooklyn business that sells Dog Day Afternoon hot dogs: “It’s been open since 2021,” Ms. Walther reports, “serving delicious, no-frills dogs and serving as a living shrine to the film.”

Delving Deeper Into the Perennial Appeal of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’

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