Have You Seen ...... by David Thomson Part 11 - Dog Day Afternoon, Out of Africa and Brazil

 

Brooklyn,  22nd August 1972. Here is a young Al Pacino and a couple of associates robbing a bank in broad daylight. Amateurs, a real mess from the start. Sidney Lumet's 1975 Dog Day Afternoon is almost a satire if it had not been based on a true event. The police arrive to control the crowd who remain not that far away. Then the FBI and next all the reporters and TV crew. Just how many cops are stationed around the bank, up on rooftops, everywhere, all with guns trained on the front door. All so trigger happy. Even a helicopter. Negotiations ensue. A transition to night time. The bank staff are under pressure. But it is Pacino who carries the film, actually very physical in his performance. David Thomson thought it was "the most ribald and unexpected of (Sidney Lumet's) police procedurals". 

I selected 1985's Out of Africa mainly for John Barry's music. I had not seen the film before and was surprised it ended up sweeping the board with wins at the 1986 Oscars. There is not a lot of story. Obviously the locations, the light and cinematography makes the film visually stunning. Meryl Streep is great, Robert Redford less so. Director Sydney Pollack has tried to inject some drama and I guess it would have made a much bigger impact on a big screen. It seemed partly a tourist advertisement for Kenya. But that awful ending was perhaps disappointingly predictable. David Thomson said it was "a movie out of it's mind with excessive taste".

I already knew that this was a satire, what I had not bargained for was just how surreal this film turned out to be. Yes, the sets and imagery are spectacular, if you like that sort of thing. Director Terry Gilliam had some help on the screenplay, such as it was. But he is far more interested in the visuals he uses for all the fancy sets and hardware. All at the expense, unfortunately, of a decent script. It was called a "dystopian masterpiece" what ever that is. I was bored. The futuristic setting is offset by tiny TV screens. Is this meant to be funny? The huge cast included some fancy actors, Robert de Niro hamming it up, offset by Michael Palin's sensible Jack Lint. Ian Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Ian Holm all class. Then some actors i had not seen for years, well this is a 1985 movie. Peter Vaughn, Gordon Kaye, Nigel Planer and Bryan Pringle. Best of all was Bob Hoskins, because he gets all the good lines. We even see percussionist Ray Cooper. But as I say, totally bonkers, but not in a good way. David Thomson called it "a prototypical example of the tricky career of Terry Gilliam" and that "inventive exuberance is often at odds with the filmmaker's wish to make grave and tragic points".