Word: lumet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Directed by SIDNEY LUMET Screenplay by FRANK PIERSON
...reflect some sort of distortion upon itself. Something should happen when Ingrid Bergman parodies her idealistic, spiritual Elsa of thirty years ago. Nothing does; it's played for laughs. Maybe when you have such an assemblage of fine actors and actresses, you assume they can take care of themselves. Lumet seems to have concentrated on keeping the dialogue sparse, and the characterization quick and neat. The result is like a museum restoration with a very serious curator but subject matter laughably warped out of shape. Is Finney's accent a joke? Why does Wendy Hiller look like a nonagenarian...