Dog Day Afternoon Details

Dog Day Afternoon

Before Peter Finch was 'mad as hell' in NETWORK, Sidney Lumet's scorching indictment of the American television industry, Al Pacino played an equally ferocious and fed-up bank robber in Lumet's classic film DOG DAY AFTERNOON. Pacino is heartbreakingly real as Sonny, a smart and tough if self-destructive Brooklyn tough whose plan to rob the local bank to fund his male lover's (Chris Sarandon) sex change goes absurdly wrong. Accompanied only by his doltish accomplice, Sal (John Cazale), Sonny resorts to kidnapping a handful of bank employees when he realizes that all the money had been removed before his arrival. As the lengthy August day drags on, Sonny and the hordes of local police, led by Sergeant Moretti (Charles Durning), make little progress, and eventually Sonny's wife and lover are brought to the scene. The crowd's sympathy is immediately captured by the charismatic Sonny, whose antagonism with the police is played out before an audience of millions, leading to an inevitably tragic finish.
Balancing suspense, violence, and humor, the film's depiction of a grand scale media event craftily dives from the political to the personal, evoking a piercing portrait of a single man and his devastating downward tumble into the cracks of the system that Lumet made a career of chronicling. DOG DAY AFTERNOON reunites Pacino with his SERPICO director Lumet, and stands as one of the finest films of the 1970s.

Starring	Al Pacino, Charles Durning, James Broderick, John Cazale, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Chris Sarandon
Director	Sidney Lumet
Studio	WARNER HOME VIDEO
Run time	DVD: 1 hr 59 mins
Certificate
Collections	100 Top Thrillers
Genres	Drama
Language	DVD: English
Hearing-impaired	English
Subtitles	DVD: Arabic, English
Released	DVD: 07 Oct 2002 Production year: 1975