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DOG DAY AFTERNOON
November 16, 2019  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

 
Frank Pierson won an Oscar for his screenplay for this fact-based 1975 film, and deserved to – but he had help from two significant directions. Al Pacino, as hapless bank robber Sonny, improvised the film’s most famous scene, in which he excited and incited a crowd of onlookers by screaming “Attica!,” as director Sidney Lumet brilliantly captured the ensuing mayhem. Then there’s the real story itself, based on the magazine article by P.F. Kluge. It’s about a man so in love with his trans partner that he attempts a bank robbery in hopes of raising money for his lover’s sex-change operation – with escalatingly absurd and unpredictable results. No one would have written this story from scratch, and few people, other than Pacino, could have carried it off so dynamically. John Cazale plays Sonny’s sad-sack bank-robbery partner, and Chris Sarandon plays Sonny’s lover, Leon.
 
 
 
 
 
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