Al Pacino & Sidney Lumet: 'Dog Day Afternoon' At 50

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🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

A film about a man trying to fund a gender-affirming operation by robbing a bank sounds like a modern-day plot. But 50 years ago, that was the scenario for the classic film Dog Day Afternoon. We're featuring our interviews with director Sidney Lumet and with Al Pacino, who starred as the bank robber. Lumet gave his lead license to take the role as far as he wanted, and then pushed Pacino to do more. "It's really one of the best pieces of movie acting I've ever seen. It was blinding in its intensity, agonizingly painful," he told Terry Gross in 1988.

Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
0:05.4	RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.
0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:15.6	This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley.
0:18.7	Today's show is devoted to a film that was made 50 years ago,
0:22.2	but is regarded half a century later as one of the most daring, vibrant, and important movies of the 1970s.
0:29.2	The movie, 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, was based on a real-life Brooklyn bank robbery that had occurred three years earlier.
0:37.6	The bank robber, who was married, was hoping to escape with enough cash to finance the
0:42.9	sex change operation for his male lover. But mid-robbery, the bank was surrounded by police,
0:49.2	TV news crews, and Brooklyn onlookers, and escalated into a tense hostage situation and media circus.
0:57.2	Al Pacino, fresh from filming Godfather 2, starred as Sunny the bank robber.
1:02.7	Sidney Lumet, who already had directed Pacino in the intense cop drama Serpico, was the director.
1:09.6	Before staging and photographing the first scene, Lumet held weeks of
1:13.7	rehearsal with the cast, encouraging them to improvise. He carried that same spirit into the on-location
1:20.0	filming, and every scene crackles with energy. Here's an early scene, with Pacino as Sunny inside the bank with his hostages,
1:29.0	and with the detective outside, played by Charles Durning, making first contact by phoning the bank.
1:35.2	Is it Detective Sergeant Eugene already?
1:37.5	Yeah.
1:38.2	Okay.
1:39.6	You're in there, we're out here.
1:40.9	What are we doing now?
1:42.1	I don't know.
	...

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