Word: lumet
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Patty Hearst has been snatched again. In Network, a thriller-with-a-message by Director Sidney Lumet, a young heiress named Mary Ann Gifford is kidnaped by an outfit called the Ecumenical Liberation Army, joins them in a bank robbery, then helps them try to sell a film of the heist to a big TV network, to be shown on its Mao Tse-tung Hour. During the negotiations, which lead to the crackup of a venerable anchorman, played by Peter Finch, Mary Ann cries out, "It's not the money that's important, it's the principle...
...violent passion and sensuality in lush color without any character development. The only relief in this romantic melodrama comes when a flood washes away the virgin's shrewish grandmother and the entire vile English country estate to our intense delight. Another dull melodrama to be avoided is Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, unless you go for two and a half hour fag jokes in the guise of sympathy and relevance. Al Pacino's acting is excellent but does not overcome the ridiculous role he is saddled with...
...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...
...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...