Dog Day Afternoon

It's amazing Sydney Lumet was able to make a film like this in the 1970s. Not only make it, but make the main characters sympathetic to the audience. The general story is that two men take hostage of a bank to pay for a lover's sex-change operation. The implication of a homosexual relationship and a sex change operation was the last subject American audiences were ready to face. Lumet handles the taboo subject by keeping it hidden until late in the film, when the audience has already grown accustomed to the characters. The rest of the film is well handled. Lumet has two stories to worry about filmically, the inside the bank story and media frenzy outside. Many filmmakers deal with conflicting stories like this by having filming the media frenzy to look a well packaged commercial. They want the audience to associate what they are seeing as media coverage of a hostage situation to what they see in the news. Lumet instead films that portion to be a like a documentary instead. He doesn't allow that portion to be glitzy and out of sync with the rest of the film. He keeps the story sane. Al Pacino had a break out role here. The Godfather films put him on the map, but they also stereotyped him. Many critics commented at the time how this performance was the furthest thing from those films. It is. Pacino plays a vunerable character who has an emotional center. Godfather Part II showed that Pacino needed to operate at the level of calm and deceitful only to locate the persona of Michael Corleone. Dog Day Afternoon not only allows him to give a different performance, but a much deeper one as well.