Gay Rights and The Reception of Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

For its eccentric content, Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) has some remarkable bragging rights. It starred Al Pacino, won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Film Editing. Boasting the seventh-highest box-office gross of 1976, this commercially successful motion picture featured openly gay characters the likes of whom had never been seen on screen. The film starts with a disarming title card: "What you are about to see is true—It happened in Brooklyn, New York, on August 22, 1972." That docudrama approach continues in an opening montage of drive-by, slice-of-life Brooklyn footage on a sweltering summer day, ending in a shot of Sonny (Pacino), Sal (John Cazale), and Stevie (Gary Springer) sitting in a parked car, then stepping out, and, one-by-one, entering a bank just before it closes for the day. Audiences expecting a slick heist film are quickly disappointed when the robbery falls apart almost immediately: the young Stevie abandons them, the vault is nearly empty, and the New York police arrive to surround the bank.

After the initially comical misfortune, the film focuses on the tense situation inside the bank, as the two nervous thieves are forced to use the manager, security guard, tellers, and typists as hostages. Outside, FBI agents arrive, and a neighborhood crowd gathers, along with reporters, camera crews, and helicopters. Snipers perch on nearby rooftops, and eager policemen swarm, all of them held in check, however, by Detective Moretti (Charles Durning). Moretti tries to negotiate the release of the nine hostages, but Sonny threatens to kill them if his demands are refused. Meanwhile, policemen interview Sonny's loud, fast-talking wife, with whom he has two young children. After Sonny demands to see her, a squad car arrives bearing instead a man, Leon (Christopher Sarandon), brought from Bellevue Hospital after an attempted suicide. He is still wearing a patient's robe. To everyone's surprise, not least the film's audience, Sonny has planned the bank caper to pay for a sex change procedure for Leon. He wants to be taken with Leon to the airport so that they can escape together.

Sidney Lumet's obituary called attention to this startling film—"Vivid and powerful, direct and explosive"—because of the director's ability to make an event neatly formulated with stock characters and devices seem like a messy event occurring "right next door, right down the block…taking high melodrama and giving it a documentary feel."¹ Lumet said that he omitted scoring and Hollywood lighting, as if "you were watching a newsreel," so "that you never felt like it was a movie."² Working with "material that was sensationalist by its nature," Lumet created "a naturalistic film … as close to documentary filmmaking as one can get in a scripted movie" to avoid a negative "audience reaction" toward "something they've never confronted before"; material that hits deep nerves, the director explained, can "reveal something about yourself and others."³ Richard Dyer argues that "much of the power of the cinema rests in the belief in seeing-as-believing," in "realism/naturalism."⁴ As a result, Lumet's "striking" tableau, as one reviewer wrote, is "a veritable sociological data bank" with "an honest vitality."⁵ According to Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin, Dog Day Afternoon "retains the raucous urgency, the look and feel, of neighborhood life … with singular characters who … behave for the most part as real people rather than fictional creatures." Screenwriter Frank Pierson's "dialogue sounds accurate," and the cast performs "with easy authenticity," creating an "engrossing and unpredictable film."⁶

The film, in other words, not just the robbery it depicts, is not going the way everyone expects. Lumet is upsetting an established genre, in which power and sex should play predictable roles. Inside the bank, Sonny strikes an unspoken bond with the female bank workers. Despite his threats to the police, he tells his hostages, "I'm a Catholic; I don't want to hurt anybody." Yet he tells Detective Moretti...