Sidney Lumet: A Life Behind the Camera

Dog Day Afternoon, 1975
Superficially, it is a typical story of New York life, maybe even a microcosm of the troubles besetting the city. That is to say, it begins in farce and ends in something akin to tragedy. A trio of amateur gunmen (quickly reduced to a very odd couple) ineptly and comically try to hold up a Brooklyn bank branch. Al Pacino, as the "brains" of the operation, gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.

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