Dog Day Afternoon (Artist Entertainment Complex, Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night – February 22 – I looked for a movie on Turner Classic Movies I could watch with my husband Chalres. I found it in Dog Day Afternoon, a 1975 film based on a true-life tale of a hilariously botched bank robbery that took place at the Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank on August 22, 1972. The bizarre story that ensued was publicized as far west as San Francisco, where the Chronicle published two stories about it, both on the front page, one while the standoff on the bank was still going on and again the next day when the FBI finally arrested the lead bank robber, John Wojtowicz, and shot and killed his partner in crime, Salvatore Naturale. In 1973 Wojtowicz managed to negotiate a deal for the movie rights to the story, and the film was finally made in 1974 and released in 1975 with Al Pacino as Wojkowicz (renamed “Sonny Wortzik” for the film), John Cazale as Sal (whose last name became “Naturile”), and the young Chris Sarandon as Sonny’s boyfriend, Ernest Aron (renamed “Leon Shermer”). Dog Day Afternoon was, among other things, a pioneering film in the sympathetic depiction of both Gay and Trans characters in film (which makes it quite ironic that five years later Pacino made Cruising, a film so relentlessly homophobic in its depiction of a serial killer of Gay men various ueer-0rights groups protested it and tried to stop it from being made). In 2014 a documentary film called The Dog was released based on interviews Wojtowicz had done in the last two years of his life. (Though he was sentenced to 20 years in prison he was released after only five, and ended up with a Gay partner named George Heath whom he had met in prison.)

The real Wojtowicz was married to a woman named Carmen (called “Angie” in the film and played by Sisan Peretz)and had two children with her, but he also joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a pioneering queer-0rights group. According to Randy Wicker, a Gay journalist who helped Wojtowicz with the negotiations for the movie rights to his story, “He was considered a disgrace at GAA [dances]. He would fall on a couch and start having sex with somebody in a semi-public place. His reputation within GAA was, ‘This guy is a looney-tune.’” One part of the real story that survived intact in the film was John’s/Sonny’s motive for the robbery: he wanted the money to pay for gender-reassignment surgery for his partner. The real Wojtowicz gave his income from the film rights to Ernest, who had the operation in 1973 and took the name Elizabeth “Liz” Eden, but after that Liz told Wojtowicz she never wanted to see him again, and this led Wojtowicz to attempt suicide. This was especially ironic because Liz had also attempted – or at least threatened – suicide pre-transition, and it was that which led Wojtowicz to hatch the plot to rob the bank in the first place.

Whatever its deviations from real life – and it’s quite obvious that had screenwriter Frank Pierson stuck closer to the facts, he would never have got the film made in 1975, and certainly Al Pacino would never have agreed to star in it – Dog Day Afternoon holds up as a brilliantly entertaining and boundary-pushing movie. Al Pacino’s performance is sheer perfection (even though Randy Wicker said he made the character far more rational and sympathetic than the real person), and aside from being a landmark movie in the depiction of Queer people on film it also holds up even 48 years later,when the whole idea of men marrying men, women marrying women and Trans people marrying whomever they want inn whatever gender identity they want has become largely, if not totally, accepted. At the same time Pierson’s changes to the character make him considerably more ambiguous than he really was, and therefore more dramatically interesting: Sonny defies characterization as Gay, straight or Bi, and the way he’s presented here it’s unclear just how he got into sex with men. The real John Wojtowicz said he had his first Gay experience while in basic training for the U.S. military; both he and the fictional Sonny were Viet Nam War veterans.

The imdb.com synopsis for the 2014 documentary The Dog attributes it to the loose sexual mores of the time: “Coming of age in the 1960’s, John Wojtowicz’s libido was unrestrained even by the libertine standards of the era, with multiple wives and lovers, both women and men.” Whatever its deviations from the true story, Dog Day Afternoon holds up beautifully as a film, with Sonny achieving folk-hero status – like Alfred Hitchcock in his best films, Sidney Lumet and Frank Pierson turn our moral judgments on their heads and have us rooting for Sonny through much of the film – and there’s also a real irony in a line Sal (whose best moment comes when he takes umbrage at the report that “two homosexuals” are robbing the bank, ahd ne demands a retraction from the TV station that he is straight) speaks to one of the women they’re holding hostage. He tells her not to light the cigarette she’s asked to smoke because it will give her cancer – and,, tragically, the real John Cazale died of lung cancer on March 13, 1978 at age 42 after making just five films, all among the best of his time: this one, the first two Godfather films, The Deer Hunter and The Conversation.