In his review for The New York Times, the critic Vincent Canby wrote of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, “If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it’s reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids speculation.” He is right, of course: Lumet’s 1975 masterpiece is, on occasion, ruefully amusing, the tics and foibles of regular life incongruously interrupting a situation most dire and extraordinary.
For the most part, though, Dog Day Afternoon is a sober thriller (Canby called it a melodrama) about a small-time Brooklyn bank heist blown up into a hostage crisis and city-wide fascination, about a man hard done by the system, who, for a few glorious and dangerous hours, almost breaks free by bending that very system to his will. There is a lot of serious stuff whirring through the film’s
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