Sonny and Sal waste too much time discussing whether the tellers should get an opportunity to use the toilet prior to getting locked in the vault. The bank is surrounded by NYC cops, led by Charles Durning. Eventually, the FBI takes over, led by sinister Sheldon (James Broderick).
Sonny and Sal demand limo transportation to the airport, where they would fly to Algeria or some other distant and obscure land. Sonny also wants to see his "wife," pre-transgender Leon (Chris Sarandon). He has has lengthy and boring conversations with his mother (Judith Malina) and his legal wife Angie (Susan Peretz), who is so homely and insipid that it is little surprise he took up with Leon instead.
How others will see it. Acclaimed from day one, the film was a box office smash and received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Writing, and, most unlikely of all, a Best Supporting Actor nod for Sarandon.
The imdb.com user ratings are extremely high, and the film ranks near the middle of that website's Top 250. The ratings do drop slightly with age, from 9.0/10 from viewers under 18 to 8.0/10 from those over 45. The movie receives a 7.4 from women over 45, a demographic that makes up its own mind about a film's worth.
How I felt about it. Although the film does depict a true story, that doesn't mean it is fully accurate. Sal, for example, was a teenager, and not a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. John Wojtowicz, named Sonny Wortzik in the present film, did not speak to, much less confront, his mother. John had separated from his wife two years prior to the bank robbery, and the wife apparently was not fat, plain, and stupid, as presented here.
The film suggests that Sonny set up Sal to be shot by the FBI. This made John none too popular in prison, where there were attempts made on his life. You might be curious what happened to Sonny and Leon. Wojtowicz was eventually released from prison. He died in 2002. Leon, whose name became Elizabeth Eden after her operation, died of AIDS in 1987. But Charles Durning is still with us at age 87 (as of 2010), despite the undoubtedly vast numbers of hot dogs and hamburgers he has consumed over the years.
All of which proves that violent crime does not pay, after all. White collar crime and overripe acting are different matters entirely.
As popular as Dog Day Afternoon was and is, I still have problems with it. I had seen the film in the early 1990s, and thought that Pacino was hammy, especially in the scenes where he paces the sidewalks and excites the crowds near the bank. But the same can't be said about the rest of his scenes, which are more subdued and naturalistic. Even John Wojtowicz wrote that Pacino did a good job, and that is enough of an endorsement for me.
More problematic is whether we are supposed to feel sorry for Sonny and Sal. They can't get a factory job somewhere, and eke out a living like the rest of us? They have to steal money at the point of a gun instead? There is nothing heroic, or even anti-heroic, about Sonny. And there's no guarantee that he would have spent the money on Leon's operation.
The Stockholm Syndrome bank employees are more convincing. Sheldon has a tirade against Sonny, but the women tellers quickly bond with the robbers. They have good reason to. The more human they become to Sonny, the less likely it is that he will shoot them.
Some things are difficult to complain about, since they actually happened. It seems incredible that the police contacted the robbers while they were in the bank and had hostages, when it would have been much wiser to wait for the robbers to "escape" with the loot, then capture or shoot them. I don't know whether the boyfriend/husband of one of the hostages actually tackled Sonny/John when he was outside negotiating. I doubt it.