Word: lumet
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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...
Directed by SIDNEY LUMET Screenplay by FRANK PIERSON
...surface. The flashback sequence at the beginning is pared to the bone; blue filters and slow motion make it into a ballet of form, a non-human prelude to a film that for the rest of its length is nothing but people talking at each other. Next Lumet shows us his cast assembling from all over the world to board the Orient Express at Istanbul. There's the involuntary shudder of pleasure when you recognize a regal Vanessa Redgrave sailing through a crowd of Turkish peddlers, as Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset airily overturn a huge cart of oranges...
OTHER BLUNDERS, though, may be credited to Lumet. The disclosure scene is bungled by being to flatly spelled-out; the flashbacks are too insistent, show too much. Everything is reduced to a simple formula; each murderer gets his motive neatly assigned to him. The energy is lost that should be generated in any room containing John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman et al. Lumet doesn't seem to realize that such energy won't generate itself, that he has to do something to make it happen. The pace of his film is slow, so slow at the beginning that...
...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...